A feature of modern living today is the ubiquity of automated systems or artificial agents. Such agents are implementations of machine learning using neural networks and deep learning. They vary in their level of sophistication and complexity. What they have in common is that they supplant and automate processes that would otherwise require human intervention. An artificial agent’s choice of action at any instance depends on (a) its built-in knowledge and (b) the sequence of content its sensors have perceived (the agent’s percept sequence). The choice is effected by mapping every percept sequence to each choice of action, by way of different implementations or combinations of implementations known as ‘models’.  While humans, who have desires and preferences of their own, choose actions that produce desirable results from their point of view (or additionally, are morally, ethically and legally correct), machines do not have desires and preferences of their own.  Instead, an artificial agent is programmed to maximize its performance based on these models and one that does so successfully is said to exhibit ‘rationality’ or ‘intelligence’.