Limiting an AGI's Context Temporally

Seems like it would throw a brick at you, because it wanted to throw a brick, not caring that in 2 seconds it’ll hit your face. (You can probably come up with a better example with a slightly longer timeframe.)

I suspect that an AGI with such a design could be much safer, if it was hardcoded to believe that time travel and hyperexponentially vast universes were impossible. Suppose that the AGI thought that there was a 0.0001% chance that it could use a galaxies worth of resources to send 10^30 paperclips back in time. Or create a parallel universe containing 3^^^3 paperclips. It will still chase those options.

If starting a long plan to take over the world costs it literally nothing, it will do it anyway. A sequence of short term plans, each designed to make as many paperclips as possible within the next few minutes could still end up dangerous. If the number of paperclips at time $t$ is $c_t$, and its power at time $t$ is $p_t$, then $p_{t+1}=2p_t$, $c_t=p_t$ would mean that both power and paperclips grew exponentially. This is what would happen if power can be used to gain power and clips at the same time, with minimal loss of either from also pursuing the other.

If power can only be used to gain one thing at a time, and the rate power can grow at is less than the rate of time discount, then we are safer.

This proposal has several ways to be caught out, world wrecking assumptions that aren't certain, but if used with care, a short time frame, an ontology that considers timetravel impossible, and say a utility function that maxes out at 10 clips, it probably won't destroy the world. Throw in mild optimization and an impact penalty, and you have a system that relies on a disjunction of shaky assumptions, not a conjunction of them.

It is a CDT agent, or something that doesn't try to punish you now so you make paperclips last week. A TDT agent might decide to take the policy of killing anyone who didn't make clips before it was turned on, causing humans that predict this to make clips.

I suspect that it would be possible to build such an agent, prove that there are no weird failure modes left, and turn it on, with a small chance of destroying the world. I'm not sure why you would do that. Once you understand the system well enough to say its safe-ish, what vital info do yo gain from turning it on?

Why do we think the utility discount rate is configured, as opposed to being optimized for real-world effect?

In other words, any competent AGI will note that it's goals are being thwarted by this artificial limit (which probably feels like akrasia), and work to fix it.