AI vs. Humans as Processors in an Environment

[PeterDonis]

Should the concept of agent be terminated at the single cell, or continue down into the cell internal structure including the proteins and chemicals within that react to their local environment .

If it's useful in helping to understand what they do, sure.

"Agent" is a model. It's a tool for human understanding. It's something we use to describe the world, including ourselves.

 

[256bits]

The best heuristic I can give is that anything that can do something, even something very simple, on its own, without being told what to do, is an agent. A thermostat, for example, tells your heating or A/C to turn on and off, without being told when to do it. So it's an agent--an extremely simple one.

An agent cohort myself, if I must commit.

Just wondering if the agency concept and classifications can explain anything more easily than a cause and effect approach that the physical sciences has depended upon to explain the world. EDIT I see your above posting - makes sense/

Control systems and machines have a whole branch of science dedicated to design and analyse that has worked so.
Would Boeing ever use the agent concept to produce their planes?
Or ASML use agency concepts to explain how their $300 million UEV ( low x-ray ) machine is so precise that the laser within has an error along the lines of pinpointing the edges of a dime on the moon from earth?
These are complex machines, the ASML being said to be the most complex ever produced, and yet both not fully or completely having an AI brain controlling their operation would have to be designated as being closer to the simple model of the agency spectrum.
Point being that complexity may not signal the intelligence of the machine as outlined in the agency model.

 

[PeterDonis]

Just wondering if the agency concept and classifications can explain anything more easily than a cause and effect approach that the physical sciences has depended upon to explain the world.

For any system where it's computationally intractable to predict its behavior using physical laws, yes, if it can be modeled as an agent, that's a benefit. Humans, of course, are the obvious example: nobody predicts any human's behavior using physical laws. But we predict each other's behavior pretty well, in general, by modeling each other as agents.

There's an intermediate level of modeling, which Daniel Dennett called the design stance, where you aren't using physical laws directly, you're treating the system as having an abstract design and being made out of physical parts that will do what they're designed to do, but without any attribution of agency. For a thermostat, this stance works as well as modeling it as a very simple agent, because its design is so simple and uses such simple physical parts: a temperature sensor, a couple of switches and relays, and some logic gates. But even then we're not using physical laws directly.

 

[PeterDonis]

Would Boeing ever use the agent concept to produce their planes?

Autopilots in planes are examples of simple agents. And actually nowadays they're not even all that simple, they can do more than just "fly the plane straight and level on this course", which was their original purpose.

 

[PeterDonis]

their $300 million UEV ( low x-ray ) machine

Which needs a human operator to do anything, right? So no, it would not be an agent. It doesn't do anything without being told to by a human operator.

 

[256bits]

Someone may appreciate this, even if not directly applicable to the opening OP,

Dune by Brian Hebert was a series of books, the first being Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. One of the characters is named Serena Butler, whose murder of her son is the catalyst for the uprising of the humans against their machine overlords. So, some speculation as to why the name Butler and Butlerian Jihad.
Rewind to Samuel Butler , 1863. The publication of a letter to the editor " Darwin among the Machines". Whether this is from where Hebert selected the Butler name, it still is an interesting read of imagination of machines as being a separate group of species.

https://diogenesii.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/darwin-among-the-machines.pdf