Futarchy and Unfriendly AI

Analogous to turning the universe into paper clips

That's a low bar: it's an intentionally silly example. No one actually thinks we're likely to accidentally create a paperclip maximizer AI anymore than we're likely to accidentally include a "number of paperclips in the world" term in a futarchy metric. But something as clearly negative would be mandatory wireheading to maximize a "human pleasure" term.

A less extreme (and less clearly negative, but also more likely) example would be maximizing GDP. Hanson often uses GDP as an example of something you could include in a futarchy metric. GDP only counts market work, however, which means you can increase GDP by moving tasks from "do them yourself" to "hire someone". For example, if I watch my kid that doesn't count towards GDP, but if I pay you to watch them, and you pay me to do whatever you would otherwise have done during that time, it does.

GDP/person is one of the best metrics for "how is a country doing", often doing much better than explicit attempts to measure things closer to what we care about, but put a big optimizing push behind it and soon all the tiny tasks we do over the course of the day are pressured into market work.

Can you suggest a scenario in which futarchy would fail to prevent the universe from being turned into paperclips?

This relates to my previous post on confounding in Prediction Markets. In my analysis, if we allow human feedback between setting the values and implementing the strategy, you break the causal interpretation of the prediction market and therefore lose the ability to use it for optimization. This is obviously a trade-off between other considerations that may be more important, but you will run into big problems if the market participants expect there is a significant probability that humans will override the market

There's no room for human feedback between setting the values and implementing the optimal strategy.

Here and elsewhere I've advocated* that, rather than using Hanson's idea of target-values that are objectively verifiable like GDP, futarchy would do better to add human feedback in the stage of the process where it gets decided whether the goals were met or not. Whoever proposed the goal would decide after the prediction deadline expired, and thus could respond to any improper optimizing by refusing to declare the goal "met" even if it technically was met.

[ * You can definitely do better than the ideas on that blog post, of course.]

"Futarchy" is an obscure, non-descriptive name. Better call it something like "prophetocracy"

"Futarchy" is the standard term for this governmental system. Perhaps Hanson should have chosen a different name, but that's the name its been going under for about a decade and I don't think "prophetocracy" would be an improvement.

Think about the laws that govern these things, and how to use them to make these things better for us.

On a related point, here's a post about using swarms to build morality into intelligent systems:

http://unanimousai.com/building-moral/

The development of an evil AI is most definitely an inefficient allocation of society's limited resources.

First using the term "evil" here is a good way to show that you don't know what you are talking about. We are talking about "unfriendly".

That said, there are reasons to believe that people who build AGI are overoptimistic in their own creations and might think they produce a useful AGI but actually produce UFAI. As a result there no reason to expect that nobody funds the relevant research.