An autonomous agent is a system situated in, and part of, an environment, which senses that environment, and acts on it, over time, in pursuit of its own agenda. This agenda evolves from drives (or programmed goals). The agent acts to change the environment and influences what it senses at a later time. The term drive has several common meanings: A form of computer storage, such as a hard drive. ... There is more than one usage of the word goal. ...
Non-biological examples include autonomous robots, and various software agents, including artificial life agents, and many computer viruses. Autonomous robots are robots which can perform desired tasks in unstructured environments without continuous human guidance. ... In computer science, a software agent is a piece of autonomous, or semi-autonomous proactive and reactive, computer software. ... Artificial life, also known as alife or a-life, is the study of life through the use of human-made analogs of living systems. ... In computer security technology, a virus is a self-replicating program that spreads by inserting copies of itself into other executable code or documents (for a complete definition: see below). ...
References
Franklin, Stan and Graesser, Art (1997) "Is it an Agent, or just a Program?: A Taxonomy for Autonomous Agents," Intelligent Agents III, Berlin: Springer Verlag, 21-35,
Someone is an autonomousagent, the coherentists argue, if and only if she accepts her motives, or identifies with them, or approves of them, or believes that they make sense in terms of her long term commitments or plans.
The emphasis on an autonomousagent's responsiveness to her own reasoning reflects the intuition that someone whose education consisted of a method of indoctrination that deprived her of the ability to call her own attitudes into question would, in effect, be governed by her “programmers,” not by herself.
If agents cannot initiate their own actions “on purpose” without authorizing themselves (their motives) to do so, then the distinguishing feature of autonomousagents is not that they identify with their motives but that the authority they assert in doing so is more than a mere formality.
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