I like the paper, but am wondering how (or whether) it applies to TDT and acausal trading. Doesn’t the trading imply a form of convergence theorem among very powerful TDT agents (they should converge on an average utility function constructed across all powerful TDT agents in logical space)?
Or have I missed something here? (I’ve been looking around on Less Wrong for a good post on acausal trading, and am finding bits and pieces, but no overall account.)
It does indeed imply a form of convergence. I would assume Stuart thinks of the convergence as an artifact of the game environment the agents are in. Not a convergence in goals, just behavior. Albeit the results are basically the same.
If there’s convergence in goals, then we don’t have to worry about making an AI with the wrong goals. If there’s only convergence in behavior, then we do, because building an AI with the wrong goals will shift the convergent behavior in the wrong direction. So I think it makes sense for Stuart’s paper to ignore acausal trading and just talk about whether there is convergence in goals.
Global scale acausal trading, if it’s possible in practice (and it’s probably not going to be, we only have this theoretical possibility but no indication that it’s possible to actually implement), implies uniform expected surface behavior of involved agents, but those agents trade control over their own resources (world) for optimization of their own particular preference by the global acausal economy. So even if the choice of AI’s preference doesn’t have significant impact on what happens in AI’s own world, it does have significant impact on what happens globally, on the order of what all the resources in AI’s own world can buy.
There was an incident of censorship by EY relating to acausal trading—the community’s confused response (chilling effects? agreement?) to that incident explains why there is no overall account.
I did post the following on one of the threads, which suggested to me a way in which it would happen or at least get started
Again, apologies if this idea is nuts or just won’t work. However, if true, it did strike me as increasing the chance of a simulation hypothesis. (It gives powerful TDT AIs a motivation to simulate as many civilizations as they can, and in a “state of nature”, so that they get to see what the utility functions are like, and how likely they are to also build TDT-implementing AIs...)
I like the paper, but am wondering how (or whether) it applies to TDT and acausal trading. Doesn’t the trading imply a form of convergence theorem among very powerful TDT agents (they should converge on an average utility function constructed across all powerful TDT agents in logical space)?
Or have I missed something here? (I’ve been looking around on Less Wrong for a good post on acausal trading, and am finding bits and pieces, but no overall account.)
It does indeed imply a form of convergence. I would assume Stuart thinks of the convergence as an artifact of the game environment the agents are in. Not a convergence in goals, just behavior. Albeit the results are basically the same.
If there’s convergence in goals, then we don’t have to worry about making an AI with the wrong goals. If there’s only convergence in behavior, then we do, because building an AI with the wrong goals will shift the convergent behavior in the wrong direction. So I think it makes sense for Stuart’s paper to ignore acausal trading and just talk about whether there is convergence in goals.
Not necessarily, it might destroy the earth before its goals converge.
Global scale acausal trading, if it’s possible in practice (and it’s probably not going to be, we only have this theoretical possibility but no indication that it’s possible to actually implement), implies uniform expected surface behavior of involved agents, but those agents trade control over their own resources (world) for optimization of their own particular preference by the global acausal economy. So even if the choice of AI’s preference doesn’t have significant impact on what happens in AI’s own world, it does have significant impact on what happens globally, on the order of what all the resources in AI’s own world can buy.
There was an incident of censorship by EY relating to acausal trading—the community’s confused response (chilling effects? agreement?) to that incident explains why there is no overall account.
No, I think it’s more that the idea (acausal trading) is very speculative and we don’t have a good theory of how it might actually work.
Thanks for this… Glad it’s not being censored!
I did post the following on one of the threads, which suggested to me a way in which it would happen or at least get started
Again, apologies if this idea is nuts or just won’t work. However, if true, it did strike me as increasing the chance of a simulation hypothesis. (It gives powerful TDT AIs a motivation to simulate as many civilizations as they can, and in a “state of nature”, so that they get to see what the utility functions are like, and how likely they are to also build TDT-implementing AIs...)
It was censored, though there’s a short excerpt here.
By the way, I still can’t stop thinking about that post after 6 months. I think it’s my favorite wild-idea scenario I’ve ever heard of.