Episode Details
Back to Episodes“Agency is not a natural kind (and why that might matter for alignment)” by SJ_Beard
Description
Epistemic status: trying to articulate a big idea which I feel is important but underexplored, partly because it is hard to frame clearly - may not be framing it clearly yet!
Agency, both natural and artificial, is very important. Understanding agency allows us to model our own behaviour and that of others, and it is thus one of the most predictively useful concepts we have at our disposal. In its ordinary, folk-psychological sense, agents are ‘like us’ in important behavioural respects, more or less, meaning we can use thoughts like ‘what would I do if I were them’ to good effect.
However, that does not mean agency is a natural kind. The truth is that we are not the people we imagine ourselves to be, and neither are the humans, animals, complex systems, or even inanimate objects we are prone to thinking of as fellow agents. We are, in fact, nothing but a bunch of hierarchically ordered biological processes in a trench coat. Our behaviour is not neatly determined by our thoughts and ideas, but by a complex mesh of impulses, desires, emotions, and heuristics that are often no less confusing (even, or especially, to the highly intelligent [...]
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First published:
June 30th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.