I find this semantic critique interesting but I have to disagree with you. Underlying the critique is a hidden arrogance. Agency language is strongly tied to o

I find this semantic critique interesting but I have to disagree with you. Underlying the critique is a hidden arrogance. Agency language is strongly tied to our ability to understand the mechanism by which phenomena occurred. For example, take 4 different chess bots: 1. The bot moves in a 100% predictable way to you (say it checks each piece in order to find a possible move, the first it finds that's legal it moves) 2. The bot moves randomly 3. The bot uses minimax + library (traditional chess engine) 4. The bot is running via reinforcement learning When we discuss the moves the bot made, in which of the above scenarios would we say it 'chose' to move in a particular way? These different examples call out different forms of 'agency'. In cases 3 and 4 (maybe even 2?) most people - including the creator of the bot - would say the bot chose to move pawn to c4. As effect gets sufficiently far removed from cause it's natural to ascribe agency to the mechanism. In a very real sense in case 4 the creator designed the bot but has no idea why it moves in certain ways - they can analyze the weights of course - but why did it 'choose' those weights over others during training? If we knew that we wouldn't need the costly training in the first place. So back to your distaste of agency language when describing a phenomena. We're talking about _incredibly_ complex machinery. There is no guarantee that these mechanisms are a 1. or even a 3. type bot. They could be a 5. or 6. (whatever that even means). Thus even if we knew _everything_ about the last order mechanism, we would still ascribe agency to the effect.