People with high intrinsic motivation and agency will rule the world of tomorrow, weilding AI to acheive their personal visions. Everyone else will be weilded by AI.
You may well be right. Interesting to think about the relationship between agency & intrinsic motivation...
One of my other favorite theories is HEXACO. And personality does play into intrinsic motivation, to some extent.
Disclaimer: I skimmed the article.
Fun autonomy hacks:
1. Reframe the narrative. For example, when I studied CS at school, I didn't study CS. I studied how to learn as fast as possible. I happened to have studied CS.
2. Listen to Spotify to get into a solo task. I usually turn it down if I happen to get focused.
Also a note: intrinsic motivation is tough when you're sleep deprived. I've had moments where I was motivated and sleep deprived but they often don't coincide.
This is all to say that stuff like this go onto a fundamental layer of physical health. Something I dind't quite get when I was younger.
That's an example
As for the Spotify example. I just like listening to my playlists, every task becomes more chill. Also, I like working on a Mac more than a Windows laptop. I've had one company restricting my choice there to Windows. Me sort of hacking their company policies such that I could work on a Mac made me feel a lot better.
Simple example: if you believe an action you did was a really bad thing, you will most likely feel negative emotions about it. However, if you can figure out a perspective that will reframe the information you have in a different light and therefore you now believe it was a positive thing, you will likely feel good about what you did.
Example (I'm improvizing so not fully according to the sketch outlined above):
Negative: I don't dare to talk to that person because they don't know me and it is not done to talk to someone you don't know without a context.
Positive: While it is unusual to talk to someone you don't know without a context, I give that person a chance to meet me. If I tend to do this often enough, then there will be people that are open to this.
I can see approaching things in a different way. I was fond of a more Socratic approach for a while, as an example. But that is more than just reframing, that is using a different approach.
For your example, it looks like you are making sure to consider things in a way that does not assume the outcome?
Unfortunately I've only experienced this three times in my life; typically around major life events (once when starting a new job in a new industry, once when quitting that job to make my own stuff, and once in grade school: the summer between 10th and 11th grade, for some reason). I look forward to seeing more research, and hopefully one day can apply these learnings to manually trigger this intense focus and motivation.
To allow an embodied agent to perform actions within an environment that would generally be considered positive, without the definition of an objective function.
To break that down, to be embodied in this case is to act, sense and have some internal model that can be adapted, all operating within an environment that can be considered external to the agent.
An objective function is where there is some external push towards optimality that requires knowledge of the sensors, actuators, environment, etc. A good test for whether you accidentally baked in system knowledge is if you change the rules considerably and the agent will not operate.
Whether or not an agent acts positively can itself be measured by an environment specific objective function. A properly operating intrinsically motivated agent may perform well on some metrics, i.e. long time lived, reduced search time, etc.
Why do you want an intrinsically motivated agent? Almost all reward/objective functions are somewhat flawed, even if the problem is simple. I am reminded of a group training a robot to walk fast, measured by speed over time with a cut off. Simple enough? Well, they reviewed the trained agent and they immediately feel to the ground to be reset far away. In another test, the agents would purposely break the simulation environment, causing the agents to glitch and be launched far. One thing to note is that in each of those scenarios, the agent optimised for the reward, but made themselves "useless" after doing so.
For AI I have found Empowerment an interesting solution to intrinsic motivation [1]. Essentially agents choose actions to "keep their options open", and try to avoid actions that would reduce the action state space. The actual environment itself is not encoded into the algorithm and the state spaces are arbitrary and could be replaced with any symbol. As a result, you can make large changes to the environment and use the same motivation algorithm.
Some games are made to burn time, like Thumper.
Some games are made to burn you neurons like Baba is You.
Minecraft has 2 modes. Creative and Zombie. Both equally powerful incentives.
I try to keep the plasticity of my brain. Not to let it crust and crumble like Play Doh left outside the tub.
Consciousness is a consensus mechanism by which the self is constructed. It is a recursive loop where the self emerges, experiences, and folds in the next experience to create an evolving, expanding self. With language we have the ability to freeze many of these ideas and we are able to go much further. "I can think, feel, experience and reflect on this"
And why a consensus mechanism? Because "you" are actually a constellation of cells and experiences that needs to be sufficiently decentralized but also be able to act and plan in the very short and long term. How do you get 87 billion cells (in our case) to decide as one? That is actually a pretty difficult engineering problem where you have to think about both compute (all the different data streams coming from different sources need to be digested and acted on) and commute (one cell group in the prefrontal cortex needs to immediately broadcast a danger message to other corners of the brain, and we dont have direct wiring)
Now the natural question to ask is, what do synthetic beings need to develop both? If you are interested you might want to read our book Journey of the Mind
Here is a short read on the idea of consciousness as a consensus mechanism https://saigaddam.medium.com/consciousness-is-a-consensus-me...
https://www.danpink.com/books/drive/
Presumably built off the same research.
Now and then, evaluation points in life emerge, where you question the 'why'. Those periods can be quite loaded with emotions of feeling lost or being insecure of where to go next. They might greatly shift perspective and hence your course of life.
To me, everything is feedback loops: you pour in energy and you get positive energy back. In that sense, the system is self sustained. However it is fragile as well, because over time, you tend to need more and more back to provide feelings of contentment.
Motivation is like love and relationships, you need to work, sometimes very hard, to sustain them.
This is why I am good at those things — I spent a lot of my time doing them and I did so because I enjoy it.
Let yourself play, find the aspects that interest you about a topic and go wild. No need for a goal, thiose will come eventually. First you need to find joy in what you're doing.
And if you don't find any of that, maybe your motivation is just money, fame or whatever and thst might be ok as well, if you're happy with doing a thing you don't like.
buzzmerchant•10h ago
As i get older, this happens less and less – which is a massive shame.
I wanted to understand whether there was any good evidence as to what intrinsic motivation is and how i might be able to cultivate it in my adult life. To do this, i did a massive deep dive of the scientific literature surrounding intrinsic motivation. This is the outcome of that research.
kridsdale1•1h ago
Anecdotally (because I’m not going to syringe my brain) I am feeling a lot more enduring wakefulness and motivation than when I skip them in my morning routine.
I did a chatGPT dive to validate this but that’s not exactly a biochemical lit review.