Agency or Agenticness is the property of effectively acting with an environment to achieve one’s goals. A key property of agents is that the more agentic a being is, the more you can predict its actions from its goals since its actions will be whatever will maximize the chances of achieving its goals. Agency has sometimes been contrasted with sphexishness, the blind execution of cached algorithms without regard for effectiveness.
One might lack agency for internal reasons, e.g., being a rock that has no goals and no ability to act, or for external reasons, e.g., being a child who is granted no freedom to act as they choose.
See Also
Free Energy Principle/Active Inference: a theory of agency and a prospective architecture of artificial agents.
Reinforcement Learning: the leading practical paradigm of creating artificial agents.
Heartbreaking: This tag includes both “human agenty-ness” and “AI becoming more agentic”.
It’d be cool if tags could be disambiguation-type pages, to “Agency (human)” and “Agency (AI)”. The disambiguation page still lets us talk about both, especially if the disambiguation, itself, is also a usable tag.
There seems to be a minor autocorrect issue in this article. It seems to me the example might have been intended to read “or ability” instead of “of ability”
I think I disagree with the sense that agency strictly requires an explicit belief (what’s an “explicit belief” anyway?) and also I’m confused about Raemon’s “Robust Agency” concept. At one point I think I understood it, but right now (the way it’s defined on the Robust Agency page), I don’t see how it’s really any different from agency fullstop.
The description of agency here feels very “Lesswrongy”, i don’t think that’s how most people would describe agency. I think what happened is that people got used to “robust agency” and it also changed their concept of “agency”.
When people usually talk about agency i don’t think they mean that in some game theoretic / decision theory sense. It’s about taking initiative, acting with intention, etc.