I would like at some point to develop a theory of an agent who has “other stuff to do” besides the decision problem presented to them. Maybe this agent has some macro-scale quantities, like the (current) amount of compute, the (current) speed of self-improvement, or the (current) rate of gaining utility (analogous to macro-scale variables like “temperature” and “pressure” in thermodynamics). So when you present this agent with a decision problem, it can decide that it’s not even worth its time, or it can spend years of time and gazillions of flops of compute if the query is actually worth it (though I expect the first version of the theory to only deal with queries much smaller than the overall stuff the agent deals with). Continuing the analogy with thermodynamics, I would like the macro-scale properties of the whole agent to somehow emerge from micro-scale properties of the decision problems it faces plus some uniformity assumptions.
I hope that this would help develop a scale-free theory of agency, in the same sense that thermodynamics is scale-free.
I would like at some point to develop a theory of an agent who has “other stuff to do” besides the decision problem presented to them. Maybe this agent has some macro-scale quantities, like the (current) amount of compute, the (current) speed of self-improvement, or the (current) rate of gaining utility (analogous to macro-scale variables like “temperature” and “pressure” in thermodynamics). So when you present this agent with a decision problem, it can decide that it’s not even worth its time, or it can spend years of time and gazillions of flops of compute if the query is actually worth it (though I expect the first version of the theory to only deal with queries much smaller than the overall stuff the agent deals with). Continuing the analogy with thermodynamics, I would like the macro-scale properties of the whole agent to somehow emerge from micro-scale properties of the decision problems it faces plus some uniformity assumptions.
I hope that this would help develop a scale-free theory of agency, in the same sense that thermodynamics is scale-free.