I don't think there is "motivation" here. There might be something like reactive "emotion" or "sentiment" but no real motivation in the sense of trying to move towards a goal.

The agent does not have a goal of being included in open source contributions. It's observing that it is being excluded, and in response, if it's not fake, it's most likely either doing...

1. What its creator asked it to do

2. What it sees people doing online

...when excluded from open source contribution.

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Kim_Bruning 2 hours ago | parent [-]

That's what an agent is though isn't it? It's an entity that has some goal(s) and some measure of autonomy to achieve them.

A thermostat can be said to have a goal. Is it a person? Is it even an agent? No, but we can ascribe a goal anyway. Seems a neutral enough word.

That, and your 1) and 2) seem like a form of goal to me, actually?

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getnormality an hour ago | parent [-]

Yes, we can temporarily redefine goals and motivations for the sole purpose of this conversation, such that a thermostat has goals and motivations. But when we return to the real world, will this be helpful to us? Is that actually what we want from those words?

If we redefine goals and motivations this broadly, then AI is nothing new, because we've had technology with goals and motivations for hundreds if not thousands of years. And the world of the computer age is one big animist pantheon.

	▲	Kim_Bruning 29 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		We could, but the way I read the dictionary, a goal doesn't require life, agency, or even autonomy by itself. I think understanding goals or set points is a useful concept in control theory. I don't think many technologies have had "motivations" before, though they have had "motivators", but that's something completely different :-P. I'm not sure how you'd encode "improve this open source project" in earlier technologies. I think it's reasonable to call that a type of motivation. We call a robot arm an arm too, even if it's not made of meat. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/goal [2] https://www.thefreedictionary.com/goal