Cyberagency: The Missing Category Between Automation and Sentience

Artificial intelligence is often described through an inadequate binary: a computationalsystem is treated either as programmed automation or as a potentially sentient entity. Thisconceptual paper introduces Cyberagency as a middle analytical category for computationalsystems capable of selecting, adapting, coordinating, and sustaining consequential behaviorwithin defined constraints, without presuming subjective experience. Cyberagency isdistinguished from Cybersentience, which concerns the separate and unresolved possibility ofphenomenal experience in computational systems. The paper proposes a formal spectrumextending from scripted automation through reactive, adaptive, persistent, emergent, and self-directedforms of cyberagency.