Agent Autonomy: Social Integrity and Social Independence

As interactions between agents become more common, it will become very important to be able to characterize and perhaps even guarantee an agent's level of autonomy. We will both want agents to perform tasks on their own while at the same time both remaining controllable by ourselves and secure from control and manipulation by others. Most intuitions of autonomy seem to involve the notion that it is related to dependence/independence. Our model of autonomy captures the notion that, in one sense, autonomy represents security from corruption and manipulation by external influences (i.e., its social integrity). Another aspect of our model captures that autonomy also represents an agent's ability to perform its tasks without dependence upon others, (i.e., its social independence). This paper therefore presents a multidimensional conceptualization of autonomy and introduces a pragmatic interpretation of our scheme that is applicable to the characterization of the autonomy level of any software entity but which is especially amenable to agent-based systems