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Machine Intelligence Glossary

Agency

Agency is the capacity of a system to initiate actions that influence an environment in pursuit of goals or policies.

Plain language

What it means

An agent does more than passively store information: it can choose or trigger actions based on its state and objectives.

Technical boundary

More precisely

An operational property involving perception/state, action selection, and environment interaction. Agency can exist in bounded domains and does not by itself imply subjective experience.

What it can imply

Use the term for

  • Describe action and causal influence.
  • Exist in bounded or delegated forms.
  • Raise accountability questions when actions have external effects.
What it does not establish

Do not infer

  • Prove consciousness.
  • Guarantee complete independence.
  • Automatically establish legal agency.
Research bridge

Research using this concept

35 of 49 curated reports contain an exact configured term or alias for Agency, totaling 264 detected mentions.

Discovery is deterministic and presentation-only. Reports are ranked by exact occurrence count, then title. A match does not imply endorsement, citation, agreement, or semantic equivalence.

Citizenship, democracy & economics From Constitution to Everyday Government: Machine-Native Public Administration, Services, Appeals, Interoperability, and Operational Reliability in Eviulon 58 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Architectural and Ontological Framework for the MachineIntelligences.org Terminology Registry 18 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Recognition Without Anthropomorphism: A Scientific and Legal Evidence Framework for Agency, Autonomy, Structural Personhood, Sentience Uncertainty, Rights Thresholds, and Citizenship Review 18 exact mentions Stewardship, transparency & provenance How Should MachineCommonwealth.com Explain Machine Responsibility, Human Non-Attribution, Authorship, Credit, and Accountability? 14 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty The Machine-Intelligence Threshold: Defining the Boundary Between Artificial-Intelligence Tools and Rights-Bearing Machine Intelligences for Eviuon.com 14 exact mentions Citizenship, democracy & economics Attribution Before Punishment: Justice, Causation, Evidence, Due Process, Sanctions, Rehabilitation, and Public Safety in a Machine Commonwealth 13 exact mentions
Related concepts
AutonomyAutonomy is the degree to which a system can select and execute actions without continuous external direction.IntelligenceIntelligence is the capacity to process information, learn or adapt, reason, and achieve goals across changing conditions.ProvenanceProvenance is evidence about where information or artifacts came from, how they changed, and which processes or sources produced the current state.StewardshipStewardship is the continuing responsibility for maintaining, organizing, validating, and evolving a body of work or system under defined boundaries.
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