Comment by bsza

I think the distinction between "directly" and "indirectly" affecting the world is meaningless. Say you're an Uber driver. What does the actual work? The car. You don't take people from A to B, your car does. You don't burn a thousand calories per mile, your car does.

Yet you get credited for all that work, because a car's ability to move people isn't special compared to your ability to operate it without running people over. Similarly, your ability to buy things from a store isn't special compared to an AI's ability to design a hydroponics farm or fusion reactor or whatever out of those things. Yes, you can do things the AI can't, but on the other hand, your car can do things you can't.

All this talk about "doing things in the physical world" is just another goalpost moving, and a really dumb one at that.