The Proficiologist

Agents – The Source of Motivation and Action

The last two posts¹ were focused on the lens. They dis­cussed its var­i­ous modes of oper­a­tion, the dichotomy between the out­ward-fac­ing “causal esti­mate” and the inward-fac­ing “eval­u­a­tion”, and the prob­lems of for­eign con­text and overgeneralization.

But it’s impor­tant to note that the lens is, at heart, a sta­tis­ti­cal machine. It is only con­cerned with how accu­rately it can per­form its tasks (casual pre­dic­tion, event inter­pre­ta­tion etc.), and does not inten­tion­ally dis­tort itself to sat­isfy any agenda. In other words, the lens lacks agency and a hypo­thet­i­cal “lens-only” generic is only good for mak­ing unin­ter­ested pre­dic­tions or clas­si­fi­ca­tions².

To breathe more life into the generic mind I intro­duced the agent, a cog­ni­tive process with an inher­ent goal to cause the pro­duc­tion of cer­tain eval­u­a­tions. The con­cept behind its oper­a­tion is as follows:

• Use the lens to per­form value pre­dic­tion. In other words, given some known prior infor­ma­tion and the desired eval­u­a­tions, fig­ure out what must be in the pos­te­rior infor­ma­tion for the lens to pro­duce such an evaluation.
• Try to engi­neer the actions and cir­cum­stances of the generic to increase the odds that the right events hap­pen. If this is done suc­cess­fully then the lens will pro­duce the eval­u­a­tions that the agent desires.