All this seems to be more or less well explained under Optimization process and Really powerful optimization process, but I’ll give my take on it, heavily borrowed from those and related readings.
I went around in circles on ‘goals’ until I decided to be rigorous in thinking naturalistically rather than anthropomorphically, or mentalistically, for want of a better term. It seems to me that a goal ought to correspond to a set of world states, and then, naturalistically, the ‘goal’ of a process might be a set of world states that the process tends to modify the world towards: a random walk would have no goal, or alternatively, its goal would be any possible world. My goals involve world states where my body is comfortable, I am happy, etc.
It depends on what Bostrom means by a search process, but, taking a stab, in this context it would not really be distinct from a goal provided it had an objective. In this framework, Google Maps can be described as having a goal, but it’s pretty prosaic: manipulate the pixels on the user’s screen in a way that represents the shortest route given the inputs. It’s hugely ‘indifferent’ between world states that do not involve changes to those pixels.
I’m not too keen on the distinction between agents and tools made by Holden because, as he says, any process can be described as having a goal—a nuclear explosion can probably be described this way—but in this context a Tool AI would possibly be described as one that is similarly hugely ‘indifferent’ between world states in that it has no tendency to optimise towards them (I’m not that confident that others would be happy with that description).
([Almost] unrelated pedant note: I don’t think utility functions are expressive enough to capture all potentially relevant behaviours and would suggest it’s better to talk more generally of goals: it’s more naturalistic, and makes fewer assumptions about consistency and rationality.)
Okay, that’s fair enough.
In the context of Superintelligence, though, in Table 11 a Tool AI is defined thusly: ‘Tool: A system not designed to exhibit goal-directed behaviour.’ I am responding directly to that. But it sounds as though you would object to Bostrom’s characterisation of tool proposals.
In Bostrom’s parlance, I think your proposals for Tool AI would be described as (1) Oracle AI + stunting and (2) Oracle AI + boxing—the energy thing is interesting. I’m hopeful they would be safe, but I’m not convinced it would take much energy to pose an existential threat.