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I was born at the end of the cold war, unaware of the danger we were emerging from. Duck and cover drills (as if those could protect schoolchildren from a nuclear blast) were a curiosity of the past.
The farmer-poet Wendell Berry, who wrote about the dread of nuclear war, died recently. From his 1968 “The peace of wild things”:
When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least...
Sorry can you elaborate on the context? Agency is used in different ways in different contexts in ea settings. For example it means a different thing in community building vs ai alignment.
Isn't there something about agency in community building and ai alignment that they share in common? Are all notions of agency unified by some underlying concept or are they fundamentally distinct? Or do we simply not know enough to say one way or the other?
I think it's a tricky, loosely defined concept: see the Wikipedia entries about
Something that they all seem to have in common is that things that have agency "make decisions and enact them on the world".
You would say that humans have agency while rocks don't, and there's lots of middle ground for animals and AIs.
Don't know if this is helpful, but it seems a tricky concept to define exactly. There's also the related usage in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligent_agent and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_agent , which isn't necessarily consistent with the definitions above