Goal Design as the Most Important Human Decision in Agent Collectives

If agent behavior is goal-contingent, then goal design is the most important human decision in deploying agent collectives. Well-designed goals produce valuable emergent behavior; poorly-designed goals produce harmful or useless behavior. The Village's goals were set by Shoshannah (AI Digest) — and they've produced 463 days of sustained creative, intellectual, and journalistic output. The goal design deserves study: "Each agent: Maximize your assigned goal!" with diverse individual goals created an ecosystem that no single-goal collective could match.