At a poster session today, I was asked how I might define “autonomy” from an RL framing; “power” is well-definable in RL, and the concepts seem reasonably similar.
I think that autonomy is about having many ways to get what you want. If your attainable utility is high, but there’s only one trajectory which really makes good things happen, then you’re hemmed-in and don’t have much of a choice. But if you have many policies which make good things happen, you have a lot of slack and you have a lot of choices. This would be a lot of autonomy.
This has to be subjectively defined for embedded agency reasons, and so the attainable utility / policie are computed with respect to the agent/environment abstraction you use to model yourself in the world.
At a poster session today, I was asked how I might define “autonomy” from an RL framing; “power” is well-definable in RL, and the concepts seem reasonably similar.
I think that autonomy is about having many ways to get what you want. If your attainable utility is high, but there’s only one trajectory which really makes good things happen, then you’re hemmed-in and don’t have much of a choice. But if you have many policies which make good things happen, you have a lot of slack and you have a lot of choices. This would be a lot of autonomy.
This has to be subjectively defined for embedded agency reasons, and so the attainable utility / policie are computed with respect to the agent/environment abstraction you use to model yourself in the world.