The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that locality is very related to abstraction. Not the distance part necessarily, but the underlying intuition. If my goal is not “about the world”, then I can throw almost all information about the world except a few details and still be able to check my goal. The “world” of the thermostat is in that sense a very abstracted map of the world where anything except the number on its sensor is thrown away.
The more I think about it, the more I come to believe that locality is very related to abstraction. Not the distance part necessarily, but the underlying intuition. If my goal is not “about the world”, then I can throw almost all information about the world except a few details and still be able to check my goal. The “world” of the thermostat is in that sense a very abstracted map of the world where anything except the number on its sensor is thrown away.