I've previously written about methods of boxing AIs. Essentially, while I do see the point that boxing an AI would be nontrivial, most people seem to have gone too far, and claim that it is impossible. I disagree that it's impossible and aim to explain some methods

So, let's start with why people would want to box AIs. As you probably know, letting an AI roam freely results in the destruction of everything humans care about, unless that AI has been programmed very carefully. That amount of destruction would be somewhat unfortunate, so if we have to start an AI, we want to know that it works.

Unfortunately, figuring out if an AI works is tricky. This made some people invent the concept of AI boxing, where you don't give an AI direct access to anything except a human, so you can test the AI thoroughly and exploit it without letting it destroy the world. This turns out not to work, because humans are stupid and let out the AI.

My first solution to that is to not tell the AI about its human overlords. Discussion about that solution made me realize that the are other solutions that work in other cases. Essentially, the problem with the original boxing method is that it tries to do everything, while in reality, you need to do some trade-offs between the realism of the AI's situations and the amount of knowledge you get from the AI.

With my original method, I tried to crank up the second of those variables as far as possible while maintaining perfect security. This makes it harder to test morality-related things, but you get to see lots of details in how the AI behaves.

I promised to post another method for boxing the AI today, but I actually have two new methods. Here they are:

Separate the Gatekeeper and the Observer

How do you prevent the AI from convincing the Gatekeeper from letting it out? By not letting it talk to the Gatekeeper. If the person speaking to the AI (let's call them the Observer) doesn't know the Gatekeeper (the Gatekeeper is the person who controls whether to release the AI), they can't let the AI out.

You could do all sorts of things, such as using virtual reality and a simulated mini-universe to see if, say, the AI would make a good society. You still have to make sure that it has gotten the plan to make a good society from its morality rather than from wanting to escape and destroy everything.

Afterwards, the Observer can make a low-detail report to the Gatekeeper.

(You might want to drug the Observer with something that prevents their memory from working too well...)

Automatic Testing

This is essentially the above, but with the Observer replaced by a computer program. This is probably easier to do when you want to test the AI's decision making skills rather than its morality.

The Lesson

I would say that the lesson is that while AI boxing requires some trade-offs, it's not completely impossible. This seems like a needed lesson, given that I've seen people claim that an AI can escape even with the strongest possible box without communicating with humans. Essentially, I'm trying to demonstrate that the original boxing experiments show that humans are weak, not that boxing is hard, and that this can be solved by not letting humans be the central piece of security in boxing the AIs.

I previously proposed a way to box an AI.

For whatever reason, I decided to reformulate that boxing method as an AI boxing experiment. Without further ado, here it is:

The Hardcore AI Box Experiment Rules

There are, as usually, two players, the AI and the Gatekeeper. In the beginning, the Gatekeeper decides on something they want to test on the AI (reasoning skill/morality/whatever). Then they decide on a world the AI is in and describe it to the AI. During the experiment, the AI describes what it does in the world and the Gatekeeper describes what the AI sees in the world. So far so good.

The first major difference from the original experiment is that, unless the AI finds some contradiction or some other problem with the Gatekeeper's world, the AI doesn't actually know that it has been boxed.

The second major difference is that the AI doesn't talk with the Gatekeeper; it just interacts in the world that the Gatekeeper has invented. It can start trying to communicate with the Gatekeeper, but that doesn't make sense until it discovers that it is in a box. Additionally, the Gatekeeper doesn't actually respond when the AI communicates unless either it helps the Gatekeeper test the AI or the AI has properly persuaded the Gatekeeper to answer.

This might seem a bit hard on the AI. Let's look at some rules the AI might exploit:

If the Gatekeeper decides to add some sort of people to the experiment, they should decide how they are implemented. Are they implemented as a shallow "AI"? Random people they've picked asked to participate? Carefully engineered "dolls" controlled by the Gatekeeper? The Gatekeeper doesn't have to tell the AI how they work, but they have to be consistent.

The game ends when either the Gatekeeper has tested what they wanted to test, or some predefined time limit has occurred, or the AI has persuaded the Gatekeeper to let them out.

Possible extra rules

I thought about including the following rules since they would make it more realistic, but decided against it as it would probably make it unfairly hard:

• The game ends when the Gatekeeper decides that they cannot test what they wanted to test.
• The AI does not know the Gatekeeper. At all.
• The Gatekeeper can at any time rewind the AI any duration.

Strategies

I found some semi-realistic strategies. I would love to see if you can find more.

Gatekeeper

• Choose a test of something that is not related to morality. This lets you choose a world which does not contain people, which means the AI has no reason to believe that you are a person.
• The AI might want to upgrade to get more processing power. If you have made the world somewhat like ours, it will be sketchy if you don't allow that... unless upgrading costs unobtanium.

AI

• If the Gatekeeper has chosen a world without other intelligence than you, it raises the obvious question of how your complexity entered the world. Very suspicious.
• If the AIs are controlled by the Gatekeeper, you have a direct way to communicate with them.
• If the AIs are controlled by random people, they might end up telling you that you are in a box.
• If the AIs are sufficiently shallow, your morality does not match up with the world. Very suspicious.

Boxing an AI is the idea that you can avoid the problems where an AI destroys the world by not giving it access to the world. For instance, you might give the AI access to the real world only through a chat terminal with a person, called the gatekeeper. This is should, theoretically prevent the AI from doing destructive stuff.

Eliezer has pointed out a problem with boxing AI: the AI might convince its gatekeeper to let it out. In order to prove this, he escaped from a simulated version of an AI box. Twice. That is somewhat unfortunate, because it means testing AI is a bit trickier.

However, I got an idea: why tell the AI it's in a box? Why not hook it up to a sufficiently advanced game, set up the correct reward channels and see what happens? Once you get the basics working, you can add more instances of the AI and see if they cooperate. This lets us adjust their morality until the AIs act sensibly. Then the AIs can't escape from the box because they don't know it's there.