Anti-Pascaline satisficer

post by Stuart_Armstrong · 2015-04-14T18:49:23.787Z · LW · GW · Legacy · 7 comments

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A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

It occurred to me that the anti-Pascaline agent design could be used as part of a satisficer approach.

The obvious thing to reduce dangerous optimisation pressure is to make a bounded utility function, with an easily achievable bound. Such as giving them a utility linear in paperclips that maxs out at 10.

The problem with this is that, if the entity is a maximiser (which it might become), it can never be sure that it's achieved its goals. Even after building 10 paperclips, and an extra 2 to be sure, and an extra 20 to be really sure, and an extra 3^^^3 to be really really sure, and extra cameras to count them, with redundant robots patrolling the cameras to make sure that they're all behaving well, etc... There's still an ε chance that it might have just dreamed this, say, or that its memory is faulty. So it has a current utility of (1-ε)10, and can increase this by reducing ε - hence by building even more paperclips.

Hum... ε, you say? This seems a place where the anti-Pascaline design could help. Here we would use it at the lower bound of utility. It currently has probability ε of having utility < 10 (ie it has not built 10 paperclips) and (1-ε) of having utility = 10. Therefore and anti-Pascaline agent with ε lower bound would round this off to 10, discounting the unlikely event that it has been deluded, and thus it has no need to build more paperclips or paperclip counting devices.

Note that this is an un-optimising approach, not an anti-optimising one, so the agent may still build more paperclips anyway - it just has no pressure to do so.

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