A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

Many designs for creating AGIs (such as Open-Cog) rely on the AGI deducing moral values as it develops. This is a form of value loading (or value learning), in which the AGI updates its values through various methods, generally including feedback from trusted human sources. This is very analogous to how human infants (approximately) integrate the values of their society.

The great challenge of this approach is that it relies upon an AGI which already has an interim system of values, being able and willing to correctly update this system. Generally speaking, humans are unwilling to easily update their values, and we would want our AGIs to be similar: values that are too unstable aren't values at all.

So the aim is to clearly separate the conditions under which values should be kept stable by the AGI, and conditions when they should be allowed to vary. This will generally be done by specifying criteria for the variation ("only when talking with Mr and Mrs Programmer"). But, as always with AGIs, unless we program those criteria perfectly (hint: we won't) the AGI will be motivated to interpret them differently from how we would expect. It will, as a natural consequence of its program, attempt to manipulate the value updating rules according to its current values.

How could it do that? A very powerful AGI could do the time honoured "take control of your reward channel", by either threatening humans to give it the moral answer it wants, or replacing humans with "humans" (constructs that pass the programmed requirements of being human, according to the AGI's programming, but aren't actually human in practice) willing to give it these answers. A weaker AGI could instead use social manipulation and leading questioning to achieve the morality it desires. Even more subtly, it could tweak its internal architecture and updating process so that it updates values in its preferred direction (even something as simple as choosing the order in which to process evidence). This will be hard to detect, as a smart AGI might have a much clearer impression of how its updating process will play out in practice than it programmers would.

The problems with value loading have been cast into the various "Cake or Death" problems. We have some idea what criteria we need for safe value loading, but as yet we have no candidates for such a system. This post will attempt to construct one.