Thanks for this post, and really, this series of posts. I had not been following along, so I started with the ““Reframing Superintelligence” + LLMs + 4 years” and worked my way back to here.
I found your initial Reframing Superintelligence report very compelling back when I first came across it, and still do. I also appreciate your update post referenced above.
The thought I’d like to offer here is that it strikes me that your ideas here are somewhat similar to what both Max Weber and Herbert Simon proposed we should do with human agents. After reading your Reframing Superintelligence report, I wrote a post here that noted that it led me to think more about this idea that human “bureaucrats” have a specific roles they play that are directed at a somewhat stable set of tasks. To me, this is a similar idea to what you’re suggesting here with the Open Agency model.
All of this to say, I think there may be some lessons here for your Open Agency Model that build from studies of public agencies, organization studies, public administration, and governance. One of the key questions across these fields is how to align human agents to performs roles and bounded tasks in alignment with the general goals of an agency.
There are of course limitations to the human agent analogy, but given LLMs agent simulating capacities, defining roles and task structures within agencies for an agent to accomplish may benefit from what we’ve learned about managing this task with human agents.
For this task, I think Weber’s notion of creating a “Beamte” to fulfill specialized roles within the bureaucracy is a nice starting point for how to prompt or craft bounded agents that might fulfill specific roles as part of an open agency. And to highlight these specific elements, I include them below as a direct quote from the Controlling Intelligent Agents The Only Way We Know How: Ideal Bureaucratic Structure (IBS) piece:
“Weber provides 6 specific features of the IBS (he calls it the Modern Bureaucracy) including:
The principle of fixed competencies
The principle of hierarchically organized positions
Actions and rules are written and recorded
In-depth specialist training needed for agents undertaking their position
The position is full time and occupies all the professional energy of the agent in that position.
The duties of the position are based on general learnable rules and regulation, which are more or less firm and more or less comprehensive
Weber goes on to argue that a particular type of agent, a beamte, is needed to fulfill the various positions specialization demands for processing information and executing actions. So what does the position or role of the beamte demand?
The position is seen as a calling and a profession
The beamte (the agent) aims to gain and enjoy a high appreciation by people in power
The beamte is nominated by a higher authority
The beamte is a lifetime position
The beamte receives a regular remuneration
The beamte are organized into a professional track.”
Anyways, this is just a potential starting point for ideas around how to create an open agency of role architectures that might be populated by LLM simulations to accomplish concrete tasks.
Thanks for this post, and really, this series of posts. I had not been following along, so I started with the ““Reframing Superintelligence” + LLMs + 4 years” and worked my way back to here.
I found your initial Reframing Superintelligence report very compelling back when I first came across it, and still do. I also appreciate your update post referenced above.
The thought I’d like to offer here is that it strikes me that your ideas here are somewhat similar to what both Max Weber and Herbert Simon proposed we should do with human agents. After reading your Reframing Superintelligence report, I wrote a post here that noted that it led me to think more about this idea that human “bureaucrats” have a specific roles they play that are directed at a somewhat stable set of tasks. To me, this is a similar idea to what you’re suggesting here with the Open Agency model.
Here’s that post, it’s from 2021: Controlling Intelligent Agents The Only Way We Know How: Ideal Bureaucratic Structure (IBS).
In that post I also not some of Andrew Critch’s work that I think is somewhat in this direction as well. In particular, I think this piece may contribute to these ideas here as well: What Multipolar Failure Looks Like, and Robust Agent-Agnostic Processes (RAAPs).
All of this to say, I think there may be some lessons here for your Open Agency Model that build from studies of public agencies, organization studies, public administration, and governance. One of the key questions across these fields is how to align human agents to performs roles and bounded tasks in alignment with the general goals of an agency.
There are of course limitations to the human agent analogy, but given LLMs agent simulating capacities, defining roles and task structures within agencies for an agent to accomplish may benefit from what we’ve learned about managing this task with human agents.
For this task, I think Weber’s notion of creating a “Beamte” to fulfill specialized roles within the bureaucracy is a nice starting point for how to prompt or craft bounded agents that might fulfill specific roles as part of an open agency. And to highlight these specific elements, I include them below as a direct quote from the Controlling Intelligent Agents The Only Way We Know How: Ideal Bureaucratic Structure (IBS) piece:
“Weber provides 6 specific features of the IBS (he calls it the Modern Bureaucracy) including:
The principle of fixed competencies
The principle of hierarchically organized positions
Actions and rules are written and recorded
In-depth specialist training needed for agents undertaking their position
The position is full time and occupies all the professional energy of the agent in that position.
The duties of the position are based on general learnable rules and regulation, which are more or less firm and more or less comprehensive
Weber goes on to argue that a particular type of agent, a beamte, is needed to fulfill the various positions specialization demands for processing information and executing actions. So what does the position or role of the beamte demand?
The position is seen as a calling and a profession
The beamte (the agent) aims to gain and enjoy a high appreciation by people in power
The beamte is nominated by a higher authority
The beamte is a lifetime position
The beamte receives a regular remuneration
The beamte are organized into a professional track.”
Anyways, this is just a potential starting point for ideas around how to create an open agency of role architectures that might be populated by LLM simulations to accomplish concrete tasks.