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paulfchristiano comments on AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol - Less Wrong
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In that case, there would be severe principle-agent problems, given the disparity between power/intelligence of the trainer/AI systems and the users. If I was someone who couldn't directly control an AI using your scheme, I'd be very concerned about getting uneven trades or having my property expropriated outright by individual AIs or AI conspiracies, or just ignored and left behind in the race to capture the cosmic commons. I would be really tempted to try another AI design that does purport to have the AI serve my interests directly, even if that scheme is not as "safe".
If an employee sucks at philosophy, how does he even recognize philosophical problems as problems that he needs to consult you for? Most people have little idea that they should feel confused and uncertain about things like epistemology, decision theory, and ethics. I suppose it might be relatively easy to teach an AI to recognize the specific problems that we currently consider to be philosophical, but what about new problems that we don't yet recognize as problems today?
Aside from that, a bigger concern for me is that if I was supervising your AI, I would be constantly bombarded with philosophical questions that I'd have to answer under time pressure, and afraid that one wrong move would cause me to lose control, or lock in some wrong idea.
Consider this scenario. Your AI prompts you for guidance because it has received a message from a trading partner with a proposal to merge your AI systems and share resources for greater efficiency and economy of scale. The proposal contains a new AI design and control scheme and arguments that the new design is safer, more efficient, and divides control of the joint AI fairly between the human owners according to your current bargaining power. The message also claims that every second you take to consider the issue has large costs to you because your AI is falling behind the state of the art in both technology and scale, becoming uncompetitive, so your bargaining power for joining the merger is dropping (slowly in the AI's time-frame, but quickly in yours). Your AI says it can't find any obvious flaws in the proposal, but it's not sure that you'd consider the proposal to really be fair under reflective equilibrium or that the new design would preserve your real values in the long run. There are several arguments in the proposal that it doesn't know how to evaluate, hence the request for guidance. But it also reminds you not to read those arguments directly since they were written by a superintelligent AI and you risk getting mind-hacked if you do.
What do you do? This story ignores the recursive structure in ALBA. I think that would only make the problem even harder, but I could be wrong. If you don't think it would go like this, let me know how you think this kind of scenario would go.
In terms of your #1, I would divide the decisions requiring philosophical understanding into two main categories. One is decisions involved in designing/improving AI systems, like in the scenario above. The other, which I talked about in an earlier comment, is ethical disasters directly caused by people who are not uncertain, but just wrong. You didn't reply to that comment, so I'm not sure why you're unconcerned about this category either.
Is this your reaction if you imagine delegating your affairs to an employee today? Are you making some claim about the projected increase in the importance of these philosophical decisions? Or do you think that a brilliant employees' lack of metaphilosophical understanding would in fact cause great damage right now?
I agree that AI may increase the stakes for philosophical decisions. One of my points is that a natural argument that it might increase the stakes---by forcing us to lock in an answer to philosophical questions---doesn't seem to go through if you pursue this approach to AI control. There might be other arguments that building AI systems force us to lock in important philosophical views, but I am not familiar with those arguments.
I agree there may be other ways in which AI systems increase the stakes for philosophical decisions.
I like the bargaining example. I hadn't thought about bargaining as competitive advantage before, and instead had just been thinking about the possible upside (so that the cost of philosophical error was bounded by the damage of using a weaker bargaining scheme). I still don't feel like this is a big cost, but it's something I want to think about somewhat more.
If you think there are other examples like this that might help move my view. On my current model, these are just facts that increase my estimates for the importance of philosophical work, I don't really see it as relevant to AI control per se. (See the sibling, which is the better place to discuss that.)
I don't see cases where a philosophical error causes you to lose control, unless you would have some reason to cede control based on philosophical arguments (e.g. in the bargaining case). Failing that, it seems like there is a philosophically simple, apparently adequate notion of "remaining in control" and I would expect to remain in control at least in that sense.