As an example, imagine a board that’s lodged directly by the wall (no other support structures). If you make it twice as wide, then it will be twice as stiff, but if you make it twice as thick, then it will be eight times as stiff. On the other hand, if you make it twice as long, it will be eight times more compliant.
In a similar way, different action parameters will have scaling exponents (or more generally, functions). So one way to decrease the risk of high-impact actions would be to make sure that the scaling exponent is bounded above by a certain amount.
Anyway, to even do this, you still need to make sure the agent’s model is honestly evaluating the scaling exponent. And you would still need to define this stuff a lot more rigorously. I think this idea is more useful in the case where you already have an AI with high-level corrigible intent and want to give it a general “common sense” about the kinds of experiments it might think to try.
So it’s probably not that useful, but I wanted to throw it out there.
Half-baked idea for low-impact AI:
As an example, imagine a board that’s lodged directly by the wall (no other support structures). If you make it twice as wide, then it will be twice as stiff, but if you make it twice as thick, then it will be eight times as stiff. On the other hand, if you make it twice as long, it will be eight times more compliant.
In a similar way, different action parameters will have scaling exponents (or more generally, functions). So one way to decrease the risk of high-impact actions would be to make sure that the scaling exponent is bounded above by a certain amount.
Anyway, to even do this, you still need to make sure the agent’s model is honestly evaluating the scaling exponent. And you would still need to define this stuff a lot more rigorously. I think this idea is more useful in the case where you already have an AI with high-level corrigible intent and want to give it a general “common sense” about the kinds of experiments it might think to try.
So it’s probably not that useful, but I wanted to throw it out there.