[etCeteraaa]

That’s just you projecting your impression of agency onto a puppet, based on prior observation of actual animals.

But make no mistake. It is a puppet. It’s a multicore processing circuit with stack pointers, instruction pointers and little else going for it.

It’s your laptop strapped to some motors. It’s not sentient, and has no agency. It’s a guided missile at best. A step above cruise control.

It lacks authority to define where it goes or form a need for continuing to stand. Thus it lacks true agency.

We can ascribe happy/sad to stand/fall, as crude, fundamental binary “emotions” but robots like BigDog are less complicated than amoeboid life found in pond scum.

Consider whether traffic lights are happy or sad, based on whether traffic obeys their signalling. Now consider traffic cameras. Now consider whether an automated ticket for running a red light on camera is an expression of emotion.

[noonespecial]

>It lacks authority to define where it goes or form a need for continuing to stand. Thus it lacks true agency.

This has been an adequate description of me on my way to work on Monday morning at too many times in my life.

I think we might just be disagreeing about how complicated the puppet is.

[poor_schlub]

You have options, that you prefer to avoid, because you choose not to cope with the inevitability of your own mortality, for emotional reasons. It's simply easier to don the mantle of the soulless worker drone.

But you do have options, and the free will to exercise them. You could rob banks, sell drugs, stay in bed, go on a hunger strike, bootleg intellectual property for fun and profit.

You have choices, up to and including suicide.

BigDog can't even commit suicide intentionally.

[JohnJamesRambo]

This is such a great comment.