One distinction worth making is between multiple pecking orders, multiple causal-decision-theoretic agents, and multiple logical-decision-theoretic agents. How many pecking orders this planet can sustain is an empirical question, and one that may have a very different answers at different tech levels, not necessarily along a monotonic trend (e.g. airplanes and satellites push towards unipolarity or some sort of kayfabe multipolarity, but then em cities might create advantages to hyperlocal agglomeration until you bump up against heat diffusion limits and there might be room for plenty of those).
At the limit, rational agents who can negotiate with each other and adjust their beliefs and make binding commitments should form a single logical-decision-theoretic agent with many differently informed and specialized local information processing nodes. This would be a singleton constituted by autonomous agents in a situation of radical equality, very different from a single dominant pecking order, but depending on how you count maximally unipolar or maximally multilateral.
“At the limit, rational agents who can negotiate with each other and adjust their beliefs and make binding commitments should form a single logical-decision-theoretic agent with many differently informed and specialized local information processing nodes”
(Can’t seem to switch from markdown so no inline)
I think that a question that this raises is if this should then be considered one larger agent or a collection of subagents? Is it not good for flexibility and resillience if the local nodes are able to take adaptive action over time?
I think we get into some very fun territory of distributed agency and hierarchical agency here.
Many nodes being a single logical agent is ideally compatible with them taking the sorts of adaptive actions over time consistent with being different causal (forwards-in-time) agents.
Could you link onto places or give a definition that makes these a little clearer, are we saying they act in equivalent ways with a given decision theory or how are you defining this?
One distinction worth making is between multiple pecking orders, multiple causal-decision-theoretic agents, and multiple logical-decision-theoretic agents. How many pecking orders this planet can sustain is an empirical question, and one that may have a very different answers at different tech levels, not necessarily along a monotonic trend (e.g. airplanes and satellites push towards unipolarity or some sort of kayfabe multipolarity, but then em cities might create advantages to hyperlocal agglomeration until you bump up against heat diffusion limits and there might be room for plenty of those).
At the limit, rational agents who can negotiate with each other and adjust their beliefs and make binding commitments should form a single logical-decision-theoretic agent with many differently informed and specialized local information processing nodes. This would be a singleton constituted by autonomous agents in a situation of radical equality, very different from a single dominant pecking order, but depending on how you count maximally unipolar or maximally multilateral.
“At the limit, rational agents who can negotiate with each other and adjust their beliefs and make binding commitments should form a single logical-decision-theoretic agent with many differently informed and specialized local information processing nodes”
(Can’t seem to switch from markdown so no inline)
I think that a question that this raises is if this should then be considered one larger agent or a collection of subagents? Is it not good for flexibility and resillience if the local nodes are able to take adaptive action over time?
I think we get into some very fun territory of distributed agency and hierarchical agency here.
Many nodes being a single logical agent is ideally compatible with them taking the sorts of adaptive actions over time consistent with being different causal (forwards-in-time) agents.
Could you link onto places or give a definition that makes these a little clearer, are we saying they act in equivalent ways with a given decision theory or how are you defining this?