Re Regulatory markets for AI safety: You say that the proposal doesn’t seem likely to work if “alignment is really hard and we only get one shot at it” (i.e. unbounded maximiser with discontinuous takeoff). Do you expect that status-quo government regulation would do any better, or just that any regulation wouldn’t be helpful in such a scenario? My intuition is that even if alignment is really hard, regulation could be helpful e.g. by reducing races to the bottom, and I’d rather have a more informed group (like people from a policy and technical safety team at a top lab) implementing it instead of a less-informed government agency. I’m also not sure what you mean by legible regulation.
Great post.
Re Regulatory Markets for AI Safety: I’d be interested in hearing more about why you think that they might not be useful in an AGI scenario, because “the goals and ex post measurement for private regulators are likely to become outdated and irrelevant”.
Why do you think the goals and ex post measurement are likely to become irrelevant? Furthermore, isn’t this also an argument against any kind of regulatory action on AI? Because with status-quo regulation, the goals and ex post measurement of regulatory outcomes are o...
Is this a fair description of your disagreement re the 90% argument?
Daniel thinks that a 90% reduction in the population of a civilization corresponds to a ~90% reduction in their power/influentialness. Because the Americans so greatly outnumbered the Spanish, this ten-fold reduction in power/influentialness doesn’t much alter the conclusion.
Matthew thinks that a 90% reduction in the population of a civilization means that “you don’t really have a civilization”, which I interpret to mean something like a ~99.9%+ reduction in t...
I think it's worth distinguishing between a legal contract and setting the AI's motivational system, even though the latter is a contract in some sense. My reading of Stuart's post was that it was intended literally, not as a metaphor. Regardless, both are relevant; in PAL, you'd model motivational system via the agents utility function, and the contract enforceability via the background assumption.
But I agree that contract enforceability isn't a knock-down, and indeed won't be an issue by default. I think we should have frame...
I agree that this seems like a promising research direction! I think this would be done best while also thinking about concrete traits of AI systems, as discussed in this footnote. One potential beneficial outcome would be to understand which kind of systems earn rents and which don't; I wouldn't be surprised if the distinction between rent earning agents vs others mapped pretty cleanly onto a Bostromian utility maximiser vs CAIS distinction, but maybe it won't.
In any case, the alternative perspective offered by the agency rents framing comp...
Thank you! :)
I wouldn't characterise the conclusion as "nope, doesn't pan out". Maybe more like: we can't infer too much from existing PAL, but AI agency rents are an important consideration, and for a wide range of future scenarios new agency models could tell us about the degree of rent extraction.
The claim that this couldn't work because such models are limited seems just arbitrary and wrong to me.
The economists I spoke to seemed to think that in agency unawareness models conclusions follow pretty immediately from the assumptions and so don't teach you much. It's not that they can't model real agency problems, just that you don't learn much from the model. Perhaps if we'd spoken to more economists there would have been more disagreement on this point.
Aside from the arguments we made about modelling unawareness, I don't think we were claiming that econ theory wouldn't be useful. We argue that new agency models could tell us about the levels of rents extracted by AI agents; just that i) we can't infer much from existing models because they model different situations and are brittle, ii) that models won't shed light on phenomena beyond what they are trying to model
The intuition is that if the principal could perfectly monitor whether the agent was working or shirking, they can just specify a cause in the contract the punishes them whenever they shirk. Equivalently, if the principal knows the agent's cost of production (or ability level), they can extract all the surplus value without leaving any rent.
Pages 40-53 of The Theory of Incentives contrasts these "first best" and "second-best" solutions (it's easy to find online).
Thanks for catching this! You’re correct that that sentence is inaccurate. Our views changed while iterating the piece and that sentence should have been changed to: “PAL confirms that due to diverging interests and imperfect monitoring, AI agents could get some rents.”
This sentence too: “Overall, PAL tells us that agents will inevitably extract some agency rents…” would be better as “Overall, PAL is consistent with AI agents extracting some agency rents…”
I’ll make these edits, with a f...
I've also found it hard to find relevant papers.
Behavioural Contract Theory reviews papers based on psychology findings and notes:
In almost all applications, researchers assume that the agent (she) behaves according to one psychologically based model, while the principal (he) is fully rational and has a classical goal (usually profit maximization).
Optimal Delegation and Limited Awareness is relevant insofar as you consider an agent knowing more facts about the world is akin to them being more capable. Papers which consider contracting scenarios with b...
Thanks for writing this! It was useful when organising my workout routine.
I read the Kovacevic et al paper on sleep you cite, and there are some caveats probably relevant to some LW readers. In particular, the benefits are less clear for younger adults.
Glad to see this published—nice work!