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Thanks for the detailed response. A bit of nitpicking (from someone who doesn't really know what they're talking about):
I'm slightly confused by this one. If we were to design the AI as a strict positive utilitarian (or something similar), I could see how the worst possible thing to happen to it would be *no* human utility (i.e. paperclips). But most attempts at an aligned AI would have a minimum at "I have no mouth, and I must scream". So any sign-flipping error would be expected to land there.
In the example, the AGI was using online machine learning, which, as I understand it, would probably require the system to be hooked up to a database that humans have access to in order for it to learn properly. And I'm unsure as to how easy it'd be for things like checksums to pick up an issue like this (a boolean flag getting flipped) in a database.
Perhaps there'll be a reward function/model intentionally designed to disvalue some arbitrary "surrogate" thing in an attempt to separate it from hyperexistential risk. So "pessimizing the target metric" would look more like paperclipping than torture. But I'm unsure as to (1) whether the AGI's developers would actually bother to implement it, and (2) whether it'd actually work in this sort of scenario.
Also worth noting is that an AGI based on reward modelling is going to have to be linked to another neural network, which is going to have constant input from humans. If that reward model isn't designed to be separated in design space from AM, someone could screw up with the model somehow. If we were to, say, have U = V + W (where V is the reward given by the reward model and W is some arbitrary thing that the AGI disvalues, as is the case in Eliezer's Arbital post that I linked,) a sign flip-type error in V (rather than a sign flip in U) would lead to a hyperexistential catastrophe.
I think this is somewhat likely to be the case, but I'm not sure that I'm confident enough about it. Flipping the direction of updates to the reward model seems harder to prevent than a bit flip in a utility function, which could be prevent through error-correcting code memory (as you mentioned earlier.)
Despite my confusions, your response has definitely decreased my credence in this sort of thing from happening.