Autonomy: a review and a reappraisal

  • Authors:
  • Tom Froese;Nathaniel Virgo;Eduardo Izquierdo

  • Affiliations:
  • Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK;Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK;Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics, University of Sussex, Brighton, UK

  • Venue:
  • ECAL'07 Proceedings of the 9th European conference on Advances in artificial life
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

In the field of artificial life there is no agreement on what defines 'autonomy'. This makes it difficult to measure progress made towards understanding as well as engineering autonomous systems. Here, we review the diversity of approaches and categorize them by introducing a conceptual distinction between behavioral and constitutive autonomy. Differences in the autonomy of artificial and biological agents tend to be marginalized for the former and treated as absolute for the latter. We argue that with this distinction the apparent opposition can be resolved.