Struck by a market-making provocation from today: "Imagine a world where you love how you make choices and you love how you're directing your attention, because tech inventors are competing to figure out how best to help you live as you intend."
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It's not clear how to align incentives so that this becomes a relevant design question for tech co's, but I'm enjoying the prompt. It's interesting that OSes have contacts, calendars, docs, etc—yet no representation of anything purposive, of ways of being, of "what matters?"
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Funny to contrast the ubiquitous to-do app's model with intentions which might deeply matter to someone, like "I want to make sure I'm taking my ideas as seriously as possible." Tasks are such a misleading way of thinking about intention. But hey, it's easier to build a to-do UI!
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So! This is deeply intertwined with goal directed behavior. It is genuinely hard to convey a goal to another entity and have them act creatively toward its accomplishment. Transmission -> comprehension -> exploration and experimentation. ...
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In the near future you will see more entities learn and develop their own goals independent of human provided tasks. This will provide the necessary skill substrate for them to both comprehend and achieve goals given to them by others. ...
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This will then allow systems to act not merely to augment and respond, but to proactively achieve. We use the term 'agents' today but we have yet to see real agency. Soon.
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Concretely I think probably or maybe someone at OpenAI or Unity is closest to building the framework in which agency can be studied on a principled basis.
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It's funny: so much of how I think about this topic is about *rejecting* goal-orientation. Being the way I want to be often means fixating less on goals and more on tastes, values, beliefs, etc. But I take your point; I'm interested in how agents can help in an IA-not-AI sense!
Totally agree, my terms should be clarified. Goals arise when attempting to fulfill *needs*. The best solution to hearing my goal is to understand the need which caused me to formulate it. Your fulfilment of my need might not pass through the point I designated as a goal.
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The exciting thing, AI wise, is that we're moving from singular external/rigid tasks and goals, to multiple innate needs which require goal setting + planning to fulfill and balance.
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