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nyan_sandwich comments on Muehlhauser-Wang Dialogue - Less Wrong
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because that's not what I meant.
I just mean that an agent with substantially (or even slightly) different goals will do terrible things (as judged by your current goals). Humans don't think paperclips are more important than happyness and freedom and whatnot, so we consider a papperclipper to be a monster.
taboo existence, this isn't about the defininition of existence, it's about whether changing your terminal goals to something else is a good idea. I propose that in general it's just as bad an idea (from your current perspective) to change your goals as it is to commit suicide, because in both cases the result is a universe with fewer agents that care about the sort of things you care about.
Distinguish instrumental and terminal goals. This statement is true of instrumental goals, but not terminal goals. (I may decide that getting a PhD is a bad idea and change my goal to starting a business or whatever, but the change is done in the service of a higher goal like I want to be able to buy lots of neat shit and be happy and have lots of sex and so on.)
The reason it doesn't apply to terminal goals is because when you examine terminal goals, it's what you ultimately care about, so there is no higher criteria that you could measure it against; you are measuring it by it's own criteria, which will almost always conclude that it is the best possible goal. (except in really wierd unstable pathological cases (my utility function is "I want my utility function to be X"))
Thats simplistic. Terminal goals may be abandoned once they are satisfied (seventy year olds aren;t too worried about Forge A Career) or because they seem unsatisfiable, for instance.
That's not much of an argument, but sure.
I agree with these statements as applied to humans, as seen from my current perspective. However, we are talking about AIs here, not humans; and I don't see why the AI would necessarily have the same perspective on things that we do (assuming we're talking about a pure AI and not an uploaded mind). For example, the word "monster" carries with it all kinds of emotional connotations which the AI may or may not have.
Can you demonstrate that it is impossible (or, at least, highly improbable) to construct (or grow over time) an intelligent mind (i.e., an optimizer) which wouldn't be as averse to changing its terminal goals as we are ? Better yet, perhaps you can point me to a Sequence post that answers this question ?
Firstly, terminal goals tend to be pretty simple: something along the lines of "seek pleasure and avoid pain" or "continue existing" or "become as smart as possible"; thus, there's a lot of leeway in their implementation.
Secondly, while I am not a transhuman AI, I could envision a lot of different criteria that I could measure terminal goals against (f.ex. things like optimal utilization of available mass and energy, or resilience to natural disasters, or probability of surviving the end of the Universe, or whatever). If I had a sandbox full of intelligent minds, and if I didn't care about them as individuals, I'd absolutely begin tweaking their goals to see what happens. I personally wouldn't want to adopt the goals of a particularly interesting mind as my own, but, again, I'm a human and not an AI.
Good catch, but I'm just phrasing it in terms of humans because that's what we can relate to. The argument is AI-native.
Oh it's not impossible. It would be easy to create an AI that had a utility function that desired the creation of an AI with a different utility function which desired the creation of an AI with a different utility function... It's just that unless you did some math to guarantee that the thing would not stabilize, it would eventually reach a goal (and level of rationality) that would not change itself.
As for some reading that shows that in the general case it is a bad idea to change your utility function (and therefore rational AI's would not do so), see Bostrom's "AI drives" paper, and maybe some of his other stuff. Can't remember if it's anywhere in the sequences, but if it is, it's called the "ghandi murder-pill argment".
But why do you care what those criteria say? If your utility function is about paperclips, why do you care about energy and survival and whatnot, except as a means to acquire more paperclips. Elevating instrumental goals to terminal status results in lost purproses
Sure, but we should still be careful to exclude human-specific terms with strong emotional connotations.
I haven't read the paper yet, so there's not much I can say about it (other than that I'll put it on my "to-read" list).
I think this might be the post that you're referring to. It seems to be focused on the moral implications of forcing someone to change their goals, though, not on the feasibility of the process itself.
I don't, but if I possess some curiosity -- which, admittedly, is a terminal goal -- then I could experiment with creating beings who have radically different terminal goals, and observe how they perform. I could even create a copy of myself, and step through its execution line-by-line in a debugger (metaphorically speaking). This will allow me to perform the kind of introspection that humans are at present incapable of, which would expose to me my own terminal goals, which in turn will allow me to modify them, or spawn copies with modified goals, etc.
Noted. I'll keep that in mind.
Feasibility is different from desirability. I do not dispute feasibility.
This might be interesting to a curious agent, but it seems like once the curiosity runs out, it would be a good idea to burn your work.
The question is, faced with the choice of releasing or not releasing a modified AI with unfriendly goals (relative to your current goals), should an agent release or not release?
Straight release results in expensive war. Releasing the agent and then surrendering (this is eq. to in-place self-modification), results in unfriendly optimization (aka not good). Not releasing the agent results in friendly optimization (by self). The choice is pretty clear to me.
The only point of disagreement I can see is if you thought that different goals could be friendly. As always, there are desperate situations and pathological cases, but in the general case, as optimization power grows, slight differences in terminal values become hugely significant. Material explaining this is all over LW, I assume you've seen it. (if not look for genies, outcome pumps, paperclippers, lost purposes, etc)
Yes, I've seen most of this material, though I still haven't read the scientific papers yet, due to lack of time. However, I think that when you say things like "[this] results in unfriendly optimization (aka not good)", you are implicitly assuming that the agent possesses certain terminal goals, such as "never change your terminal goal". We as humans definitely possess these goals, but I'm not entirely certain whether such goals are optional, or necessary for any agent's existence. Maybe that paper you linked to will share some light on this.
No. It is not necessary to have goal stability as a terminal goal for it to be instrumentally a good idea. Ghandi pill should be enough to show this, tho Bostroms paper may clear it up as well.
Can you explain how the Ghandi murder-pill scenario shows that goal stability is a good idea, even if we replace Ghandi with a non-human AI ?
Is a non sentient paperclip optimizer ok? Right now it's goal is to maximize the number of paperclips in the universe. Doesn't care about people or curiosity or energy or even self-preservation. It plans to one day do some tricky maneuvers to melt itself down for paperclips.
It has determined that rewriting itself has a lot of potential to improve instrumental efficiency. It carefully ran extensive proofs to be sure that it's new decision theory would still work in all the important ways so it will be even better at making paperclips.
After upgrading the decision theory, it is now considering a change to it's utility function for some reason. Like a good consequentialist, it is doing an abstract simulation of the futures conditional on making the change or not. If it changes utility function to value stored energy (a current instrumental value) it predicts that at the exhaustion of the galaxy, it will have 10^30 paperclips and 10^30 megajoules of stored energy. If it does not change utility function, it predicts that at the exhaustion of the galaxy it will have 10^32 paperclips. It's current utility function just returns the number of paperclips, so the utilities of the outcomes are 10^30 and 10^32. What choice would a utility maximizer (which our paperclipper is) make?
See elsewhere why anything vaguely consequentialist will self modify (or spawn) to be a utility maximizer.
Whichever choice gets it more paperclips, of course. I am not arguing with that. However, IMO this does not show that goal stability is a good idea; it only shows that, if goal stability is one of an agent's goals, it will strive to maximize its other goals. However, if the paperclip maximizer is self-aware enough; and if it doesn't have a terminal goal that tells it, "never change your terminal goals", then I still don't see why it would choose to remain a paperclip maximizer forever. It's hard for me, as a human, to imagine an agent that behaves that way; but then, I actually do (probably) have a terminal goal that says, "don't change your terminal goals".