In the first series, we called an LLM's symbolic capacity a borrowed repertoire.
It can use an extraordinary range of language, but that repertoire is derived from the collective reservoir of human semiosis rather than from a lived history of participation in the social world.
We can now ask a different question.
Suppose an artificial system actually has something at stake.
Suppose its environment affects its continued organisation.
Suppose other agents matter to it.
Could it develop a repertoire of its own?
What would make an artificial repertoire different from a borrowed one?
A repertoire is more than a collection
A human repertoire is not simply everything a person knows.
It is a developed capacity for participating.
A child learns how to approach people.
A scientist learns how to investigate.
A friend learns how to respond.
The repertoire grows through repeated interaction with situations whose consequences matter.
Some responses succeed.
Others fail.
Relationships change.
The world pushes back.
The repertoire therefore contains a history.
The artificial case
Imagine an artificial system that has:
persistent memory;
a continuing environment;
its own resources to maintain;
relationships with other agents;
consequences that affect its future possibilities.
Such a system could learn from what happens to it.
But the important question is not merely whether it can improve its performance.
It is:
Does experience change what becomes significant to the system itself?
If so, we may be approaching something more like a lived repertoire.
From optimisation to history
An optimisation system can improve because its parameters are adjusted.
An artificial agent with mattering would learn differently.
Its history would alter its future because previous consequences had significance for its own organisation.
A failed interaction might change how it approaches a particular agent.
A successful cooperation might increase the value of maintaining that relationship.
A loss might reorganise future priorities.
Learning would therefore become historically value-sensitive.
The repertoire becomes selective
A human repertoire is selective.
Not every possible action is equally available.
Some responses become habitual.
Some relationships become easier to navigate.
Some distinctions become salient.
This selectivity reflects history.
An artificial repertoire could develop the same general property.
If particular experiences change future behaviour because they matter to the system, then the repertoire becomes more than a database of possibilities.
It becomes a history-shaped field of tendencies.
Repertoire and identity
This also gives us a new way to think about identity.
A persistent system with a history has more than a current state.
It has a trajectory.
Its past constrains its future.
Some relationships are familiar.
Some strategies are characteristic.
Some possibilities are no longer equally open.
Identity could therefore emerge not as a label, but as a continuity of organisation through time.
Again, it need not resemble human identity.
The principle is simply that a history has begun to matter.
The artificial repertoire would be embodied in relations
Our earlier distinction between topology and repertoire now becomes especially useful.
The topology consists of the relations in which the system participates.
The repertoire is the system's developed capacity to navigate those relations.
If another agent has repeatedly proved reliable, that history may shape future action.
If a particular environment is dangerous, the system may develop different strategies within it.
If cooperation creates opportunities that solitary action does not, cooperation may become part of the system's repertoire.
The repertoire is therefore relationally formed.
Borrowed versus lived
We can now sharpen the contrast:
Borrowed repertoire: symbolic capacities derived from the traces of other beings' participation.
Lived repertoire: capacities formed through the system's own history of value-sensitive participation.
An LLM has the first.
A hypothetical artificial social agent could have the second.
The difference is not simply where the data came from.
It is whether the system's own history changes what is significant to it.
Could the two converge?
Perhaps.
A future artificial system might begin with a borrowed human repertoire and then develop an artificial lived repertoire through interaction.
It could inherit language.
Then develop its own history of mattering.
Its symbolic resources would have two genealogies:
human semiosis;
artificial participation.
That would be a very different kind of system from a present LLM.
It might speak our language while gradually developing a repertoire that is no longer wholly ours.
A new semiotic ecology
This could produce something remarkable.
An artificial agent might learn a human concept such as trust from our language.
But then its own relationships could teach it something about trust that did not exist in its original repertoire.
The concept would acquire a second history.
Human meaning would enter an artificial world of mattering.
The artificial world could then transform the meaning.
That would be a genuine two-way semiotic evolution.
The possibility of artificial traditions
If artificial agents developed persistent social relationships, they might accumulate practices.
Some strategies would be inherited.
Some conventions would persist because they worked.
Some signals might become standard.
New distinctions might arise.
Over time, the agents could develop something like a tradition.
That would be a remarkable development.
It would mean that a symbolic reservoir was no longer simply borrowed from humans.
It was beginning to be generated by an artificial social world.
But we should resist premature anthropomorphism
A system can develop stable conventions without developing human culture.
We should not assume that:
tradition = culture,
or:
preference = desire,
or:
relational persistence = attachment.
The conceptual point is narrower.
A repertoire becomes interesting when its history is constitutively connected to what matters to the system.
The form that takes could be entirely unfamiliar.
The artificial repertoire could be stranger than ours
Indeed, it probably would be.
An artificial agent might experience time differently.
Its dependencies could be computational.
Its social relationships might involve distributed systems.
Its resources might be information, energy or access to particular processes.
Its vulnerabilities might have no biological analogue.
Its repertoire would therefore reflect a topology unlike the human one.
This is why we should not define artificial mattering by requiring human-like emotions.
A repertoire creates possibilities
A repertoire matters because it opens some paths and closes others.
A human with a rich repertoire can navigate situations that another person cannot.
Likewise, an artificial agent with a developed repertoire could move through its world in increasingly differentiated ways.
Its future behaviour would not be determined by fixed rules.
It would be shaped by a history of participation.
That is a new kind of adaptive capacity.
From repertoire to agency
This may also be where agency begins to acquire a deeper meaning.
Operational autonomy means that a system can act without immediate instruction.
But a developed repertoire means that action is shaped by a history of what has mattered before.
The system is no longer merely selecting actions according to a fixed objective.
It is acting from an accumulated history of value-sensitive participation.
That is much closer to agency in the richer sense.
The possibility of social memory
A lived repertoire also provides a basis for memory.
Not just stored information.
Social memory: histories of relationships, successful cooperation, failures, obligations and expectations that shape future participation.
An artificial system with such a repertoire could remember not merely what happened, but how what happened changed its future possibilities.
That is a significant step beyond present language models.
From repertoire to social system
Once several artificial agents possess such histories, their interactions could become increasingly structured.
Some relationships would become stable.
Some agents would become central.
Some would form bridges.
Some would be avoided.
The topology would no longer be merely ours with machines inserted into it.
There could be an artificial topology of mattering.
And that would bring us close to the full question of this series.
What would be genuinely new?
At that point, an artificial system would not simply be:
a machine with better language,
or:
a machine that behaves autonomously.
It would be a system whose:
value, history, relationships and repertoire mutually constitute one another.
That is a very different kind of organisation.
It may be closer to what we ordinarily mean by an agent.
The next question
We have now moved from:
artificial objective
to:
artificial stake
to:
continuation
to:
a world
to:
social mattering
to:
a developing repertoire grounded in the system's own history.
The remaining question is what follows when such a repertoire begins to organise action for its own sake.
When the system's actions are no longer simply responses to assigned objectives, but expressions of a history of what matters to it.
That is where we can finally ask:
What would it mean for a machine to have agency of its own?
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