I find it difficult to believe that there can be no objective criteria for recognising agency when there are objective criteria for building agents.
If you are willing to countenance counterfactuals, it’s possible to get more rigourous about “seems like an agent”. A system is goal-driven if it would have displayed different circumstances to achieve the same goal, IE. It avoids obstacles. A system has a utility function if there is part of the system you can change to achieve different goals, in the preceding sense.
I find it difficult to believe that there can be no objective criteria for recognising agency when there are objective criteria for building agents.
If you are willing to countenance counterfactuals, it’s possible to get more rigourous about “seems like an agent”. A system is goal-driven if it would have displayed different circumstances to achieve the same goal, IE. It avoids obstacles. A system has a utility function if there is part of the system you can change to achieve different goals, in the preceding sense.