The concept can be rescued, at least from that objection, by saying instead that their should be some value alpha, such that for any description of a state of the universe, the utility of that state is less than alpha times the complexity of that description. That is, the asymptotic complexity of utility is linear in terms of complexity.
However, the utility function still isn't up for grabs. If our actual true utility function violates this rule, I don't want to say that an AGI is unfriendly for maximizing it.
However, the utility function still isn't up for grabs. If our actual true utility function violates this rule, I don't want to say that an AGI is unfriendly for maximizing it.
Of course. The proposal here is that "our actual true utility function" does not violate this rule, since we are not in fact inclined to give in to a Pascalian mugger.
For background, see here.
In a comment on the original Pascal's mugging post, Nick Tarleton writes:
Coming across this again recently, it occurred to me that there might be a way to generalize Vassar's suggestion in such a way as to deal with Tarleton's more abstract formulation of the problem. I'm curious about the extent to which folks have thought about this. (Looking further through the comments on the original post, I found essentially the same idea in a comment by g, but it wasn't discussed further.)
The idea is that the Kolmogorov complexity of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" should be much higher than the Kolmogorov complexity of the number 3^^^^3. That is, the utility function should grow only according to the complexity of the scenario being evaluated, and not (say) linearly in the number of people involved. Furthermore, the domain of the utility function should consist of low-level descriptions of the state of the world, which won't refer directly to words uttered by muggers, in such a way that a mere discussion of "3^^^^3 units of disutility" by a mugger will not typically be (anywhere near) enough evidence to promote an actual "3^^^^3-disutilon" hypothesis to attention.
This seems to imply that the intuition responsible for the problem is a kind of fake simplicity, ignoring the complexity of value (negative value in this case). A confusion of levels also appears implicated (talking about utility does not itself significantly affect utility; you don't suddenly make 3^^^^3-disutilon scenarios probable by talking about "3^^^^3 disutilons").
What do folks think of this? Any obvious problems?