What is "agent foundations"?
Some things in the world behave like “agents A system that can be understood as taking actions towards achieving a goal.
Agent foundations is a research program which tries to understand the nature of agents and their properties, often in a mathematically precise way. It asks questions such as “What are the necessary components of an agent?”, “Can we predict which systems will be agents, and how they will behave?”, and “Which agent designs are tolerant of human error?” There are many open problems in agent foundations research.
Some frameworks which various research groups are developing in order to study agent foundations are embedded agency An agent which is not modeled as separate from the environment it acts on.
Researchers disagree about which features of a system are essential for “agency". Some researchers have a fairly narrow view of what qualifies as an agent, requiring a long list of abilities. Other researchers (including the originators of the agent foundations research program) consider the term “agent” to be ambiguous, and include any system that optimizes towards a "goal” (in a broad sense) in their research on agent foundations.