s an e-coli an agent? Does it have a world-model, and if so, what is it? Does it have a utility function, and if so, what is it? Does it have some other kind of “goal”
That’s the part I find puzzling in terms of lack of time devoted to it: how can one talk about agency without figuring out the basics like that. Though I personally argued that it might not even be possible to do in this post, which conjectured that vapor bubbles”maximizing their volume” in a pot of boiling water are not qualitatively different from bacteria going against sugar gradient in search of food.
It’s hard to articulate exactly why, but I feel like “utility-maximizing agent(s)” is not the right frame to think about AI in. You can fit a utility function to any sequence of ‘actions’ an ‘agent’ makes, so the abstraction “utility function” has no real power to predict the ‘actions’ of an ‘agent’. There’s also the fundamental human bias of ascribing agency to non-agentic systems (the weather, printers).
That’s the part I find puzzling in terms of lack of time devoted to it: how can one talk about agency without figuring out the basics like that. Though I personally argued that it might not even be possible to do in this post, which conjectured that vapor bubbles”maximizing their volume” in a pot of boiling water are not qualitatively different from bacteria going against sugar gradient in search of food.
It’s hard to articulate exactly why, but I feel like “utility-maximizing agent(s)” is not the right frame to think about AI in. You can fit a utility function to any sequence of ‘actions’ an ‘agent’ makes, so the abstraction “utility function” has no real power to predict the ‘actions’ of an ‘agent’. There’s also the fundamental human bias of ascribing agency to non-agentic systems (the weather, printers).