Although, digging into the previously-mentioned finer points, I think there is room for some meaningful disagreement.
I don’t think there are goal-generators as you describe them. I think there are just goals, and then some plan-making/search mechanism which does goal translation/adaptation/interpretation for any given environment the agent is in. I. e., the “goal generators” are separate pieces from the “ur-goals” they take as input.
And as I’d suggested, there’s a continuum of ever-more specific objectives. In this view, I think the line between “goals” and “plans” blurs, even, so that the most specific “objectives” are just “plans”. In this case, the “goal generator” is just the generic plan-making process working in a particular goal-interpreting regime.
(Edited-in example: “I want to be a winner” → “I want to win at chess” → “I want to win this game of chess” → “I want to decisively progress towards winning in this turn” → “I want to make this specific move”. The early steps here are clear examples of goal-generation/translation (what does winning mean in chess?), the latter clear examples of problem-solving (how do I do well this turn?), but they’re just extreme ends of a continuum.)
The initial goal-representations from which that process starts could be many things — mathematically-precise environment-independent utility functions, or goals defined over some default environment (as I suspect is the case with humans), or even step-one objective-generators, as you’re suggesting. But the initial representation being an objective-generator itself seems like a weirdly special case, not how this process works in general.
Although, digging into the previously-mentioned finer points, I think there is room for some meaningful disagreement.
I don’t think there are goal-generators as you describe them. I think there are just goals, and then some plan-making/search mechanism which does goal translation/adaptation/interpretation for any given environment the agent is in. I. e., the “goal generators” are separate pieces from the “ur-goals” they take as input.
And as I’d suggested, there’s a continuum of ever-more specific objectives. In this view, I think the line between “goals” and “plans” blurs, even, so that the most specific “objectives” are just “plans”. In this case, the “goal generator” is just the generic plan-making process working in a particular goal-interpreting regime.
(Edited-in example: “I want to be a winner” → “I want to win at chess” → “I want to win this game of chess” → “I want to decisively progress towards winning in this turn” → “I want to make this specific move”. The early steps here are clear examples of goal-generation/translation (what does winning mean in chess?), the latter clear examples of problem-solving (how do I do well this turn?), but they’re just extreme ends of a continuum.)
The initial goal-representations from which that process starts could be many things — mathematically-precise environment-independent utility functions, or goals defined over some default environment (as I suspect is the case with humans), or even step-one objective-generators, as you’re suggesting. But the initial representation being an objective-generator itself seems like a weirdly special case, not how this process works in general.