The author seems to want to label any discourse as “anthropomorphizing”. The word “goal” stood out to me: the author wants us to assume that we're anthropomorphizing as soon as we even so much as use the word “goal”. A simple breadth-first search that evaluates all chess boards and legal moves, but stops when it finds a checkmate for white and outputs the full decision tree, has a “goal”. There is no anthropomorphizing here, it's just using the word “goal” as a technical term. A hypothetical AGI with a goal like paperclip maximization is just a logical extension of the breadth-first search algorithm. Imagining such an AGI and describing it as having a goal isn't anthropomorphizing.
>>Timwi+(OP)
Author here. I am entirely ok with using "goal" in the context of an RL algorithm. If you read my article carefully, you'll find that I object to the use of "goal" in the context of LLMs.