Is instrumental convergence a thing for virtue-driven agents?

Consequentialism is an approach for converting intelligence (the ability to make use of symmetries to e.g. generalize information from one context into predictions in another context or to e.g. search through highly structured search spaces) into agency, as one can use the intelligence to predict the consequences of actions and find a policy which achieves some criterion unusually well.

While it seems intuitively appealing that non-consequentialist approaches could be used to convert intelligence into agency, I have tried a lot and not been able to come up with anything convincing. For virtues in particular, I would intuitively think that a virtue is not a motivator per se, but rather the policy generated by the motivator. So I think virtue-driven AI agency just reduces to ordinary programming/GOFAI, and that there's no general virtue-ethical algorithm to convert intelligence into agency.

The most straightforward approach to programming a loyal friend would be to let the structure of the program mirror the structure^[1] of the loyal friendship. That is, you would think of some situation that a loyal friend might encounter, and write some code that detects and handles this situation. Having a program whose internal structure mirrors its external behavior avoids instrumental convergence (or any kind of convergence) because each behavior is specified separately and one can make arbitrary exceptions as one sees fit. However, it also means that the development and maintenance burden scales directly with how many situations the program generalizes to.

1. ^{^}

   This is the "standard" way to write programs - e.g. if you make a SaaS app, you often have template files with a fairly 1:1 correspondence to the user interface, database columns with a 1:many correspondence to the user interface fields, etc.. By contrast, a chess bot that does a tree search does not have a 1:1 correspondence between the code and the plays; for instance the piece value table does not clearly affect it's behavior in any one situation, but obviously kinda affects its behavior in almost all situations. (I don't think consequentialism is the only way for the structure of a program to not mirror the structure of its behavior, but it's the most obvious way.)

It could still be a competent agent that often chooses actions based on the outcomes they bring about. It's just that that happens as an inner loop in service of an outer loop which is trying to embody certain virtues.

I think you've hidden most of the difficulty in this line. If we knew how to make a consequentialist sub-agent that was acting "in service" of the outer loop, then we could probably use the same technique to make a Task-based AGI [? · GW] acting "in service" of us. Which I think is a good approach! But the open problems for making a task-based AGI still apply, in particular the inner alignment problems.

agents with many different goals will end up pursuing the same few subgoals, which includes things like "gain as much power as possible".

Obvious nitpick: It's just "gain as much power as is helpful for achieving whatever my goals are". I think maybe you think instrumental convergence has stronger power-seeking implications than it does. It only has strong implications when the task is very difficult.^[1]

But what if we get AIs that aren't pure consequentialists, for example because they're ultimately motivated by virtues? Do we still have to worry that unless such AIs are motivated by certain very specific virtues, they will want to take over the world?

[...]

Is there any reason to expect that the best way to be a schmoyal schmend is to take over the world?

(Assuming that the inner loop <-> outer loop interface problem is solved, so the inner loop isn't going to take control). Depends on the tasks that the outer loop is giving to the part-capable-of-consequentialism. If it's giving nice easy bounded tasks, then no, there's no reason to expect it to take over the world as a sub-task.

But since we ultimately want the AGI to be useful for avoiding takeover [? · GW] from other AGIs, it's likely that some of the tasks will be difficult and/or unbounded. For those difficult unbounded tasks, becoming powerful enough to take over the world is often the easiest/best path.

1. ^{^}

   I'm assuming soft optimisation here. Without soft optimisation, there's an incentive to gain power as long as that marginally increases the chance of success, which it usually does. Soft optimisation solves that problem.

My view is that the answer is still basically yes for instrumental convergence being a thing for virtue driven agents, if we condition on them being as capable as humans, because instrumental convergence is the reason general intelligence works at all:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/GZgLa5Xc4HjwketWe/instrumental-convergence-is-what-makes-general-intelligence [LW · GW]

(That said, the instrumental convergence pressure could be less strong for virtues than for consequentialism, depending on details)

That said, I do think virtue ethics and dentology are relevant in AI safety because they attempt to decouple the action from the utility/reward of doing it, and they both have the property that you evaluate plans using your current rewards/values/utilities, rather than after tampering with the value/utility function/reward function, and these designs are generally safer than pure consequentialism.

These papers more generally talk about decoupled RL/causal decoupling, which is perhaps useful on how dentology/virtue ethics actually works:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.04734

https://arxiv.org/abs/1705.08417

https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.08827

I'd buy that virtue driven agents are safer, and perhaps exhibit less instrumental convergence, but instrumental convergence is still a thing for virtue-driven agents.

No matter what the goal, power seeking is of general utility. Even if an AI is optimizing for virtue instead of some other goal, more power would, in general, give them more ability to behave virtuously. Even if the virtue is something like "be an equal partner with other beings", an AI could ensure equality by gaining lots of power and enforcing equality on everyone.

I very much agree with the approach and the values in virtue; in case for humans, we enforce virtues either through empathy or law/punishments (in modern societies); wondering how that can be most effectively translated to machines in a consistent way

I've been thinking about a similar thing a lot.

Consider a little superintelligent child who always wants to eat as much candy as possible over the course of the next ten minutes. Assume the child doesn't ever care about what happens ten minutes from now.

This child won't work very hard at any instrumental goals like self improvement and conquering the world to redirect resources towards candy production, since that would be a waste of time, even though it might maximize candy consumption in the long term.

AI alignment isn't any easier here, the point of this is just to illustrate that instrumental convergence is far from given.

Well, I don't have a good answer but I also do have some questions in this direction that I will just pose here.

Why can't we have the utility function be some sort of lexicographical satisficer of sub parts of itself, why do we have to make the utility function consequentialist?

Standard answer: Because of instrumental convergence, duh. 

Me: Okay but why would instrumental convergence select for utility functions that are consequantialist?

Standard answer: Because they obviously outperform the ones that don't select for the consequences or like what do you mean?

Me: Fair but how do you define your optimisation landscape, through what type of decision theory are you looking at this from? Why is there not a universe where your decision theory is predicated on virtues or your optimisation function is defined over sets of processes that you see in the world? 

Answer (maybe)?: Because this would go against things like newcombs problem or other decision theory problem that we have.

Me: And why does this matter? What if we viewed this through something like process philosophy and we only cared about the processes that we set in motion in the world? Why isn't this an as valid way of setting up the utility function? Similar to how a eculidean geometry is as valid as a hyperbolic one or one logic system to another? 

So, that was a debate with myself? Happy to hear anyone's thoughts here.

I'm less and less convinced that we should expect to see AIs that are close to pure consequentialists

There was a case when ChatGPT preferred not to violate the taboo on racial slurs, even though in the hypothetical situation it meant killing millions of people. In a re-run of the experiment ChatGPT decided to use the slur, but it also remarked that the use is a complex ethical dilemma. How can one check whether the AI will prefer not to violate the taboo on colonialism? By placing it into a simbox [LW · GW] where one also has analogues for peoples that are easy to be taken over?

P.S. I doubt that a non-neuromorphic AI is even able to take over the world and run it since the world's entire energy generation might require too much intellectual work to do by the AI itself. There was a post [LW · GW] claiming that even a neuromorphic AI is unlikely to become much more efficient than the brain.