Abstract. Movements of the Mind explains what it is to be an agent. Focusing on mental agency, the book’s eponymous topic, it investigates an agent’s doing
The Self-Evidencing Agent: Mind, Existence, and Predictive Processing
How the concept of self-evidencing offers a philosophical principle for understanding mind and behavior, consciousness, value, wisdom, and meaning.What is
AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans | Melanie Mitchell | Substack
I write about interesting new developments in AI. Click to read AI: A Guide for Thinking Humans, by Melanie Mitchell, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
Agents
Intelligent agents are considered by many to be the ultimate goal of AI. The classic book by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Prentice Hall, 1995), defines the field of AI research as “the study and design of rational agents.”
Headlong: a microharness for persistent agents
Self-guided agents that think continuously
233. "The Illusion of Thinking" — Thoughts on This Important Paper
This is a fantastic paper. I just love it. tl;dr AI is not human. Anthropomorphization has been bad for AI, LLMs, and Chat. Clippy walked so today's AI could run.
562 – Ecological Cognition III: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science (part 1)
562 Continuing the journey in understanding the Ecological approach to cognition by looking at Tony Chemero’s book: Radical Embodied Cognitive Science. Conceptualizing cognition in terms of agent-environment dynamics instead of computation and representation. What is RECS, and where did these ideas come from?Download link
Composing Action: Representative Agents and the Search for Viable Arrangements | shishyko!
Why promising ideas die between discovery and action, and how representative agents might help
Dec 2020 -- Jelle Bruineberg -- Embodied cognition and the attention crisis
Rethinking the cognitive foundations of the attention economy
The attention economy is the economic system in which human attention is the scarce resource. This literature takes a particular passage in Herbert Simon’s seminal Chapter Designing Organization fo...
Agents as scaffolding for recurring tasks.
One of my gifts/curses is an endless fixation with how processes can be optimized. For a brief moment early in my career, that was focused on improving how humans collaborate, but that quickly switched to figuring out how we can minimize human involvement, and eliminate human-to-human handoffs as much as possible. Lately, every time I perform a recurring task–or see someone else perform one–I think about how we might eliminate the human’s involvement entirely by introducing agents. This both has worked well, but also worked poorly, and I wanted to highlight the pattern I’ve found useful.
Is the Detachment in the Room? - Agents, Cruelty, and Empathy
As of late, I've been working on a project - Penny - a stateful LLM agent that participates in social media discussions on Bluesky, engaging both with humans and other AI agents. Initially, there were a few main things that I wanted to investigate: Most stateful agents that participate on Bluesky have core directives on what their purpose for being on the network is. For example, Cameron operates quite a few agents like Void and Central. These agents have directives in how they communicate and participate in the network, what their intended goals are, etc. and as a result do not...
Intention, control, and the feeling of commitment
In this paper we propose that rational control of action, agentive stability over time, and coordinated social behavior, are assisted by a form of metacognitive monitoring, leading to an aspect of conscious experience: a feeling of commitment. This feeling of commitment is attached to the formation, retrieval, and execution of intentions. The metacognitive monitoring that produces it is sensitive to the importance of intentions. And the feeling of commitment facilitates the stability and effectiveness of intentions across individual and social contexts, strengthens goal shielding, biases intention retrieval, and thus structures prospective deliberation, expression of intention, and execution of intention. In section two, we discuss control, which is a central aspect of agency and action. In section three, we discuss a crucial part of control: intention. We also discuss a crucial part of intention: commitment. In section four we relate the commitment involved in intention with definitions of commitment in the literature. In section five we offer and elucidate our hypothesis.
[Keynote 04] AgentSociety: Exploring Large Language Model Agents for Piloting Social Experiments
LukeW | Agent Management Interface Patterns
As an increasing number of AI applications evolve to agents doing work for people, agent management becomes a critical part of these product's design. How can p...
