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Them and Us: Autonomous Agents In Vivo and In Silico

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Book cover Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics

Part of the book series: Outstanding Contributions to Logic ((OCTR,volume 5))

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Abstract

The concept of agency is important in philosophy, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence. Our aim in this chapter is to highlight some of the issues that arise when considering the concept of agency across these disciplines. We discuss two different views of agency: agents as actors (the originators of purposeful deliberate action); and agents as intentional systems (systems to which we attribute mental states such as beliefs and desires). We focus in particular on the view of agents as intentional systems, and discuss Baron-Cohen’s model of the human intentional system. We conclude by discussing what these different views tell us with respect to the goal of constructing artificial autonomous agents.

With apologies to Will Hutton.

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Acknowledgments

Wooldridge was supported by the European Research Council under Advanced Grant 291528 (“RACE”).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Hertford College, Oxford, OX1 3BW, UK

    Peter Millican

  2. Department of Computer Science, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX1 3QD, UK

    Michael Wooldridge

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  1. Peter Millican
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  2. Michael Wooldridge
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Correspondence to Peter Millican .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Amsterdam Inst Logic,Language & Computation, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Alexandru Baltag

  2. Amsterdam, The Netherlands

    Sonja Smets

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Millican, P., Wooldridge, M. (2014). Them and Us: Autonomous Agents In Vivo and In Silico. In: Baltag, A., Smets, S. (eds) Johan van Benthem on Logic and Information Dynamics. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06025-5_20

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