If you imagine an agent as a blackbox, you can first focus on the inputs it can receive and the outputs it can produce. In a second step, you then peek under the hood to understand what happens inside that box, how the inputs are connected to the outputs. Let us begin with the agent’s relations to the outside: What goes in? What comes out?
Tag: technology
The agent’s context
Agency can only exist within a given context, and the same applies to agents themselves. These concrete environments or abstract situations can take many different forms, that are introduced here.
Defining agency
With the 'target list' of natural and artificial agents in mind, and focusing on their common characteristics, I can now propose a working definition of agency. At its core, agency is the ability to act. And that action has certain qualities: it serves some purpose, it has a direction towards some utility. Today, I'll offer a short defining phrase and then unpack its meaning piece by piece.
Comparing natural and artificial agents
Between the natural and the artificial agents, there are many differences, but few similarities. An inclusive definition of agency needs to cater for all these agents, in all the diversity they exhibited in the preceding posts. At this stage it is useful to review the major differences, at least conceptually, because any definition of agency will be inclusive if —and only if— it remains agnostic of those differences across the diversity of agents.
The path(s) to artificial agency
Across the categories of organizations, technologies, and socio-technical systems, we can identify three principle paths to artificial agency. Ultimately, they all originate from human agency; but the degree of human deliberation varies considerably.