Infrastructure of intention
30 Oct 2021 - 07 Sep 2025
- In 2013 I wrote down some questions that seem related to the theme of agency, although I wasn't using that term. This is a lightly-revised version of that list:
- What is the nature of purpose? (cybernetics, particularly Gregory Bateson)
- How do humans and animals manage their various divergent intentions? (Freud, Tinbergen, Marvin Minsky)
- Can inanimate things have purpose? (Bruno Latour, neovitalism)
- How do individual goals relate to social structures and institutions? (all of sociology and political science, at the moment particularly Charles Tilly and Mary Douglas)
- How does goal-directed behavior work in human activity that is clearly non-functional in any simple way, like religion, art, and play?
- And some of the questions dealt more specifically with how intentions, goals, and purposes are embodied in software
- How do computer programs embody purpose? (AI)
- Can/should goals be explicitly represented? (Phil Agre and Chapman's situated action critique of planning-based AI)
- How does software encode divergent and conflicting goals? (Actor theory, Multi-agent AI)
- Can/should/how can software embody and extend human goal structures (the CSCW field, but originating maybe with Doug Engelbart)
- What would the world look like if computational infrastructure actually supported goals in a powerful way (lots of science fiction, mostly with a dystopian flavor, but for a somewhat more cheery spin, Bruce Sterling's story Maneki Neko)
- Big fucking questions, aren't they? And quite out of scale compared with my ability to provide answers, but they won't leave me alone.