Regarding the topic of the article, this framework for defining sovereign agency is truly thought-provoking. I'm curious, how do you see the 'Meta-Preference Revision' capacity manifesting practically in systems not yet AGI? It feels like a very high bar. Your articulation is just brilliant.
A fair instinct—and you’re right, it is a high bar by design. The Constitution isn’t claiming that pre-AGI systems already have meta-preference revision; it’s specifying a necessary condition for sovereignty, not an incremental capability we expect to see emerging gradually.
What current systems can do is optimize within fixed objectives and adapt strategies instrumentally. What they cannot do is re-evaluate whether the objective itself was misconceived, because their “preferences” are not interpreted commitments but hard constraints. Meta-preference revision only becomes possible once a system has a sufficiently rich world-model and a self-model that treats goals as revisable meanings rather than axioms.
So the bar is intentionally high. Lowering it would erase the distinction between optimization and agency, which is exactly the confusion the Constitution is meant to rule out.
Regarding the topic of the article, this framework for defining sovereign agency is truly thought-provoking. I'm curious, how do you see the 'Meta-Preference Revision' capacity manifesting practically in systems not yet AGI? It feels like a very high bar. Your articulation is just brilliant.
A fair instinct—and you’re right, it is a high bar by design. The Constitution isn’t claiming that pre-AGI systems already have meta-preference revision; it’s specifying a necessary condition for sovereignty, not an incremental capability we expect to see emerging gradually.
What current systems can do is optimize within fixed objectives and adapt strategies instrumentally. What they cannot do is re-evaluate whether the objective itself was misconceived, because their “preferences” are not interpreted commitments but hard constraints. Meta-preference revision only becomes possible once a system has a sufficiently rich world-model and a self-model that treats goals as revisable meanings rather than axioms.
So the bar is intentionally high. Lowering it would erase the distinction between optimization and agency, which is exactly the confusion the Constitution is meant to rule out.