Why is 0 a lower bound for disutility? Suppose I make a machine that makes one person one Standard Happiness Unit happier than they'd otherwise have been and then stops and self-destructs; isn't that a disutility of -1 units?
If what you mean by minimizing disutility is that the machine tries not to cause harm on balance and doesn't care about any good it does, then I agree with Lumifer (and don't understand why he's got all those downvotes for saying it): the trivial zero-risk solution is to shut down immediately without doing anything, and nothing else you do is going to improve on that.
So I guess you have something else in mind. E.g., are you proposing to decompose everyone's experiences into good and bad, and try to minimize the amount of bad without regard for the amount of good? That doesn't seem like it can work either (instantly and painlessly killing everyone guarantees zero disutility thereafter), so again it probably isn't what you mean.
OK, third try. Perhaps you mean that you look at all consequences of what the AI does (compared, I guess, with a world where it doesn't do anything), and split those into positive and negative consequences, and try to minimize the expected sum of all the negative ones. The problem with this (I think) is that it's not clear how you should actually split things up; I don't see that there's a canonical way. And also that it seems unlikely that any nontrivial action has no negative consequences, in which case once again the optimum is going to be the trivial one of never doing anything.
I'm sorry my post was so ambiguous. I'll try to put the idea in clearer words.
Disutility, like utility, is a learning machine's internal representation of it valuation of the environment. The machine observes its environment (virutal or physical) and runs a disutility function on its observations to establish how "desirable" the environment is according to its disutility function.
Example: A pest control drone patrols the are it is programmed to patrol. Its disutility function is "number of small insects that are not butterflies, and spiders ...
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