A LessWrong user is seeking academic papers that offer general formalizations of "agency." The user is interested in definitions that can be applied operationally across diverse domains, allowing for the automatic detection of agent-like entities in systems without prior labeling. They have found two papers, "Semantic information, autonomous agency, and nonequilibrium statistical physics" (2018) and "Towards information based spatiotemporal patterns as a foundation for agent representation in dynamical systems" (2016), which explore concepts like semantic information for viability and integrated spatiotemporal patterns for tracking agents. AI
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IMPACT Potential for new methods to automatically detect and analyze agentic behavior in AI systems.
RANK_REASON User is requesting pointers to academic papers on a specific research topic.