‘subagent’ is quite conflated. Sometimes we’re talking about the constituent parts of an emergent group actor. Sometimes we’re talking about a delegated (perhaps created) process. Sometimes we’re talking about different threads/personas within a constructed multi-persona reasoning scheme. There might be other cases.
‘agent’ is also quite conflated. Sometimes we mean an actor in a principal-agent relationship. Sometimes we mean an AI. Sometimes we mean just someone/something acting somewhat consequentialist. Sometimes we’re talking about something closer to a naked utility function.
‘shard’ is ehhh. A neologism that doesn’t seem to have a fixed meaning.
I’m somewhat thinking aloud (but have given some thought to this previously). I’d tentatively suggest using terms like:
‘delegate’ for a system which is either spun up whole cloth or conditioned to go do a particular thing
you can qualify if wanted, like ‘delegate agent’ (which implies a fair bit of autonomy) or ‘delegate process’ (which might be e.g. a relatively more mechanical sim or something)
‘subprocess’, if needed, for something that really is more like a local, non-actuating search, computation, etc.
‘principal’ for the actor doing the delegating
(personally I want to reserve ‘subagent’ for the thing which is a constituent part of something which is reasonably thought of as a group actor, but I don’t know if that use is sufficiently Schelling to win, and expect to need different words for that)
only sometimes ‘agent’, but often it’s worth tabooing that
I think I’m pretty happy with my terms, using Agent in the DeepMind Discovering Agents sense and Subagent in the Multiagent Models of Mind sense. These feel like crisp underlying abstractions which have various forms, not various different forms of things conflated together. For Shard, yep, I think I like that term and that it captures something also fairly crisp.
Very good. Some terminological thoughts:
‘subagent’ is quite conflated. Sometimes we’re talking about the constituent parts of an emergent group actor. Sometimes we’re talking about a delegated (perhaps created) process. Sometimes we’re talking about different threads/personas within a constructed multi-persona reasoning scheme. There might be other cases.
‘agent’ is also quite conflated. Sometimes we mean an actor in a principal-agent relationship. Sometimes we mean an AI. Sometimes we mean just someone/something acting somewhat consequentialist. Sometimes we’re talking about something closer to a naked utility function.
‘shard’ is ehhh. A neologism that doesn’t seem to have a fixed meaning.
I’m somewhat thinking aloud (but have given some thought to this previously). I’d tentatively suggest using terms like:
‘delegate’ for a system which is either spun up whole cloth or conditioned to go do a particular thing
you can qualify if wanted, like ‘delegate agent’ (which implies a fair bit of autonomy) or ‘delegate process’ (which might be e.g. a relatively more mechanical sim or something)
‘subprocess’, if needed, for something that really is more like a local, non-actuating search, computation, etc.
‘principal’ for the actor doing the delegating
(personally I want to reserve ‘subagent’ for the thing which is a constituent part of something which is reasonably thought of as a group actor, but I don’t know if that use is sufficiently Schelling to win, and expect to need different words for that)
only sometimes ‘agent’, but often it’s worth tabooing that
I think I’m pretty happy with my terms, using Agent in the DeepMind Discovering Agents sense and Subagent in the Multiagent Models of Mind sense. These feel like crisp underlying abstractions which have various forms, not various different forms of things conflated together. For Shard, yep, I think I like that term and that it captures something also fairly crisp.