What’s my take? I think that when we talk about goal-directedness, what we really care about is a range of possible behaviors, some of which we worry about in the context of alignment and safety.
(What I’m not saying) We shouldn’t ascribe any cognition to the system, just find rules of association for its behavior (aka Behaviorism)
That’s not even coherent with my favored approach to goal-directedness, the intentional stance. Dennett clearly ascribes beliefs and desires to beings and systems; his point is that the ascription is done based on the behavior and the circumstances.
I agree pretty strongly with all of this, fwiw. I think Dennett/the intentional stance really gets at the core of what it means for a system to “be an agent”; essentially, a system is one to the extent it makes sense to model it as such, i.e. as having beliefs and preferences, and acting on those beliefs to achieve those preferences, etc. The very reason why we usually consider our selves and other humans to be “agents” is exactly because that’s the model over sensory data that the mind finds most reasonable to use, most of the time. In doing so, we actually are ascribing cognition to these systems, and in practice, of course we’ll need to understand how such behavior will actually be implemented in our AIs. (And thinking about how “goal-directed behavior” is implemented in humans/biological neural nets seems like a good place to mine for useful insights and analogies for this purpose.)
I’m glad, you’re one of the handful of people I wrote this post for. ;)
(And thinking about how “goal-directed behavior” is implemented in humans/biological neural nets seems like a good place to mine for useful insights and analogies for this purpose.)
Definitely. I have tended to neglect this angle, but I’m trying to correct that mistake.
I agree pretty strongly with all of this, fwiw. I think Dennett/the intentional stance really gets at the core of what it means for a system to “be an agent”; essentially, a system is one to the extent it makes sense to model it as such, i.e. as having beliefs and preferences, and acting on those beliefs to achieve those preferences, etc. The very reason why we usually consider our selves and other humans to be “agents” is exactly because that’s the model over sensory data that the mind finds most reasonable to use, most of the time. In doing so, we actually are ascribing cognition to these systems, and in practice, of course we’ll need to understand how such behavior will actually be implemented in our AIs. (And thinking about how “goal-directed behavior” is implemented in humans/biological neural nets seems like a good place to mine for useful insights and analogies for this purpose.)
I’m glad, you’re one of the handful of people I wrote this post for. ;)
Definitely. I have tended to neglect this angle, but I’m trying to correct that mistake.