Yeah, the thing about this futurism business is I find it forces me to investigate some very deep questions about evolution, selfhood, agent-arena and agency. It's gets very personal for me at some point.
Certain impulses seem to have been favoured and further down the line strategies encoded with dopamine emerged. So, for us, strategizing seems to have emerged from brainstem encoded impulses. Because we are hard wired to avoid death, I think it's easy to assume that an AI will be the same.
> Autonomy, on the other hand, refers to the ability to create a nomos, to self-legislate such as to render one’s world legible and one’s actions ordered.
Have you a salient example of an appeal to "agency" that is not essentially this?
> Agency is an extended, interactive and contextual property, that is, it cannot be measured locally, I need to simultaneously consider the agency of any others I affect and am affected by, I need to consider higher-order thinking or the consequences of my actions, and it depends extremely on my circumstances.
I inquire, because this does not read as terribly different in substance from self-originated lawgiving, with perhaps an additional emphasis on _responsibility_ (that may qualify as "interactive and contextual", i.e., socially constructed, but if one can judge oneself, then that extension contracts).
The terms are indeed often treated as interchangeable, but I felt that there is enough mainstream conflation of agency with instrumental rationality and simply the capacity for goal-satisfaction to warrant some delineation, disagreements from perspectival idiosyncrasies notwithstanding. A potentially unnecessary polemic seemed the lesser evil compared to leaving the notions under discussion too vague and unclear.
> there is enough mainstream conflation of agency with instrumental rationality and simply the capacity for goal-satisfaction to warrant some delineation
I see, is then correct that rather than denying agency as a cogent concept, you see agency misinvoked when the concept of autonomy is apt for all entailments intended?
Yes, the way I see the connotation in common parlance is too strong and therefore raises too difficult problems and this is premature until basic thinking has crystallized on more solid grounds.
Yeah, the thing about this futurism business is I find it forces me to investigate some very deep questions about evolution, selfhood, agent-arena and agency. It's gets very personal for me at some point.
Certain impulses seem to have been favoured and further down the line strategies encoded with dopamine emerged. So, for us, strategizing seems to have emerged from brainstem encoded impulses. Because we are hard wired to avoid death, I think it's easy to assume that an AI will be the same.
> Autonomy, on the other hand, refers to the ability to create a nomos, to self-legislate such as to render one’s world legible and one’s actions ordered.
Have you a salient example of an appeal to "agency" that is not essentially this?
> Agency is an extended, interactive and contextual property, that is, it cannot be measured locally, I need to simultaneously consider the agency of any others I affect and am affected by, I need to consider higher-order thinking or the consequences of my actions, and it depends extremely on my circumstances.
I inquire, because this does not read as terribly different in substance from self-originated lawgiving, with perhaps an additional emphasis on _responsibility_ (that may qualify as "interactive and contextual", i.e., socially constructed, but if one can judge oneself, then that extension contracts).
The terms are indeed often treated as interchangeable, but I felt that there is enough mainstream conflation of agency with instrumental rationality and simply the capacity for goal-satisfaction to warrant some delineation, disagreements from perspectival idiosyncrasies notwithstanding. A potentially unnecessary polemic seemed the lesser evil compared to leaving the notions under discussion too vague and unclear.
> there is enough mainstream conflation of agency with instrumental rationality and simply the capacity for goal-satisfaction to warrant some delineation
I see, is then correct that rather than denying agency as a cogent concept, you see agency misinvoked when the concept of autonomy is apt for all entailments intended?
Yes, the way I see the connotation in common parlance is too strong and therefore raises too difficult problems and this is premature until basic thinking has crystallized on more solid grounds.