I only skimmed the post, so apologies if you addressed this problem and I missed it.
Problem: even if the AI’s utility function is time-bounded, there may still be other agents in the environment whose utility functions are not time-bounded, and those agents will be willing to trade short-term resources/assistance for long-term resources/assistance. So, for instance, the 10-minute laundry-folding robot might still be incentivized to create a child AI which persists for a long time and seizes lots of resources, in order to trade those future resources to some other agent who can help fold the laundry in the next 10 minutes.
That’s true! Thanks for pointing this out; I added a subsection about it to the post. There are probably also a bunch of other cases I haven’t thought of that provide stories for how the environment directly rewards actions that go against the spirit of the shutdown criterion (besides imitation and this one, which I might call “trade”). This construction does nothing to counteract such incentives. Rather, it just avoids the way that being an infinite-horizon RL agent systematically creates new ones.
As an addendum, it seems to me that you may not necessarily need a ‘long-term planner’ (or ‘time-unbounded agent’) in the environment. A similar outcome may also be attainable if the environment contains a tiling of time-bound agents who can all trade across each other in ways such that the overall trade network implements long term power seeking.
I only skimmed the post, so apologies if you addressed this problem and I missed it.
Problem: even if the AI’s utility function is time-bounded, there may still be other agents in the environment whose utility functions are not time-bounded, and those agents will be willing to trade short-term resources/assistance for long-term resources/assistance. So, for instance, the 10-minute laundry-folding robot might still be incentivized to create a child AI which persists for a long time and seizes lots of resources, in order to trade those future resources to some other agent who can help fold the laundry in the next 10 minutes.
That’s true! Thanks for pointing this out; I added a subsection about it to the post. There are probably also a bunch of other cases I haven’t thought of that provide stories for how the environment directly rewards actions that go against the spirit of the shutdown criterion (besides imitation and this one, which I might call “trade”). This construction does nothing to counteract such incentives. Rather, it just avoids the way that being an infinite-horizon RL agent systematically creates new ones.
As an addendum, it seems to me that you may not necessarily need a ‘long-term planner’ (or ‘time-unbounded agent’) in the environment. A similar outcome may also be attainable if the environment contains a tiling of time-bound agents who can all trade across each other in ways such that the overall trade network implements long term power seeking.