Could you clarify why you’re asking this question? Is it because you’re suggesting that defining “agency” would give us a way to restrict the kinds of systems that we need to consider?
I see some boundary cases: for example, I could theoretically imagine gradient descent creating something that mostly just uses heuristics and isn’t a full agent, but which nonetheless poses an x-risk. That said, this seems somewhat unlikely to me.
(Perhaps unavoidable) agent-like entities in the space of technology, culture, and memes, as I elaborated a bit more in my answer. These are egregores, religions, evolutionary lineages of technology, self-replicating AutoGPT-like viral entities, self-replicating prompts, etc.
To protect from both, even “non-agentic” AI must be aligned.
Let me ask a different question: why should I care about alignment for systems that are not agentic in the context of x-risk?
Could you clarify why you’re asking this question? Is it because you’re suggesting that defining “agency” would give us a way to restrict the kinds of systems that we need to consider?
I see some boundary cases: for example, I could theoretically imagine gradient descent creating something that mostly just uses heuristics and isn’t a full agent, but which nonetheless poses an x-risk. That said, this seems somewhat unlikely to me.
AI misuse
(Perhaps unavoidable) agent-like entities in the space of technology, culture, and memes, as I elaborated a bit more in my answer. These are egregores, religions, evolutionary lineages of technology, self-replicating AutoGPT-like viral entities, self-replicating prompts, etc.
To protect from both, even “non-agentic” AI must be aligned.