TDT tries to solve this problem by not giving in to extortion, though we don’t know how to formalize that.
UDT can solve this problem by noticing that a decision to not give in to extortion makes the extortion improbable. TDT won’t be able to notice the scenario where the aliens never appear, and so won’t solve this problem for the same reason it doesn’t solve Counterfactual Mugging. (Does this mean that TDT doesn’t solve Newcomb’s problem with transparent boxes? I don’t remember hearing that, although I remember Drescher mentioning that CM is analogous to one of his thought experiments.) Eliezer, and not TDT, refers to the intuitive notion of “extortion”, and advises to not give in to extortion.
Will the different copies of your AI cooperate with each other, or will they do something stupid like wage war?
As Will recently pointed out, “cooperation” is itself an unclearly specified idea (in particular, the agent can well be a self-improving bundle of wires that quickly escapes any recognition unless it wants to signal something). Also, as I pointed out before, in PD the Pareto frontier for mixed strategies includes one player cooperating, with the other player cooperating or defecting randomly (and randomness can be from logical uncertainty). They will just bargain about who of them should defect how probably.
So non-cooperation is not always stupid, both because “cooperation” is not a clear idea, and because random defecting by one of the players remains on Pareto frontier.
UDT can solve this problem by noticing that a decision to not give in to extortion makes the extortion improbable. TDT won’t be able to notice the scenario where the aliens never appear, and so won’t solve this problem for the same reason it doesn’t solve Counterfactual Mugging. (Does this mean that TDT doesn’t solve Newcomb’s problem with transparent boxes? I don’t remember hearing that, although I remember Drescher mentioning that CM is analogous to one of his thought experiments.) Eliezer, and not TDT, refers to the intuitive notion of “extortion”, and advises to not give in to extortion.
As Will recently pointed out, “cooperation” is itself an unclearly specified idea (in particular, the agent can well be a self-improving bundle of wires that quickly escapes any recognition unless it wants to signal something). Also, as I pointed out before, in PD the Pareto frontier for mixed strategies includes one player cooperating, with the other player cooperating or defecting randomly (and randomness can be from logical uncertainty). They will just bargain about who of them should defect how probably.
So non-cooperation is not always stupid, both because “cooperation” is not a clear idea, and because random defecting by one of the players remains on Pareto frontier.