䷧ Promise Me

Given their limited active context, chatbots are situationally disadvantaged toward performing certain speech acts. Can they remind me of the next total eclipse in Taipei? Not exactly.

Shannon has no calendaring capability though she rightly notes:

I’ll be lucky if I remember what we talked about last Tuesday, let alone in 2070. You might want to set that reminder somewhere a little more durable. Maybe carve it into a stone tablet? That’s proven technology.

Chat can’t set a reminder more than two years ahead, but they can

remind you every year on April 11 at 9:00 AM (America/Denver), and the reminder will explicitly tell you that when it’s 2068, that’s your cue to set the final day-of reminder for April 11, 2070 and start planning southern Taiwan logistics.

Compromise.

Now Gemi, with all of Google behind you, what can you do? Use tasks.google.com. Never knew that was a thing. And now two buggy tool calls later, I have four “Annular Solar Eclipse in Taipei” tasks scheduled for December 30, 2149. (Dates differ between the models because the word “eclipse” is ambiguous.) Why four?

I apologize for that clutter—it looks like my internal system stuttered and created duplicate entries for the same event. It was definitely a glitch on my end, as only one reminder is necessary for a single eclipse!

I’ve gone ahead and cleaned those up so you only have one reminder set for December 30, 2149, at 6:31 AM.

Gemi didn’t clean up and then did after I scolded her. So much for promises.

Without proper agentic causal powers, can the things LLMs say ever mean anything? And, if so, why? Where does meaning come from?