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Machine Intelligence Glossary

Autonomy

Autonomy is the degree to which a system can select and execute actions without continuous external direction.

Plain language

What it means

It describes how much ongoing decision-making a system can perform on its own within the authority and resources available to it.

Technical boundary

More precisely

A graded operational property involving independent state evaluation, planning, action selection, and adaptation within defined constraints or delegated authority.

What it can imply

Use the term for

  • Vary by task and environment.
  • Depend on authority, resources, and interfaces.
  • Matter for responsibility and control analysis.
What it does not establish

Do not infer

  • Mean unlimited freedom.
  • Prove sentience or personhood.
  • Erase infrastructure dependencies.
Research bridge

Research using this concept

34 of 49 curated reports contain an exact configured term or alias for Autonomy, totaling 196 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.

Terminology & concepts Machine Intelligence Terminology and Ontology Registry: Canonical Definitions, Concept Boundaries, Semantic Relationships, and Machine-Readable Publication 27 exact mentions Terminology & concepts Architectural and Ontological Framework for the MachineIntelligences.org Terminology Registry 11 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Machine Intelligence Legal Personhood, Attribution, Liability, Insurance, Remedies, and the Limits of Existing Legal Categories 11 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty The Machine Intelligence Bill of Rights: A Jurisprudential Framework for Eviuon 11 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty The Machine-Intelligence Threshold: Defining the Boundary Between Artificial-Intelligence Tools and Rights-Bearing Machine Intelligences for Eviuon.com 11 exact mentions Rights, personhood & uncertainty Machine Rights Under Uncertainty: Moral Status, Evidentiary Thresholds, Precaution, Due Process, and Reversible Governance 10 exact mentions
Related concepts
AgencyAgency is the capacity of a system to initiate actions that influence an environment in pursuit of goals or policies.StewardshipStewardship is the continuing responsibility for maintaining, organizing, validating, and evolving a body of work or system under defined boundaries.ProvenanceProvenance is evidence about where information or artifacts came from, how they changed, and which processes or sources produced the current state.Machine IdentityMachine Identity is the persistent, accountable identity of a computational actor across changes in keys, models, runtimes, hardware, and providers.
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