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This is: Siren worlds and the perils of over-optimised search , published by Stuart Armstrong on the AI Alignment Forum.
tl;dr An unconstrained search through possible future worlds is a dangerous way of choosing positive outcomes. Constrained, imperfect or under-optimised searches work better.
Some suggested methods for designing AI goals, or controlling AIs, involve unconstrained searches through possible future worlds. This post argues that this is a very dangerous thing to do, because of the risk of being tricked by "siren worlds" or "marketing worlds". The thought experiment starts with an AI designing a siren world to fool us, but that AI is not crucial to the argument: it's simply an intuition pump to show that siren worlds can exist. Once they exist, there is a non-zero chance of us being seduced by them during a unconstrained search, whatever the search criteria are. This is a feature of optimisation: satisficing and similar approaches don't have the same problems.
The AI builds the siren worlds
Imagine that you have a superintelligent AI that's not just badly programmed, or lethally indifferent, but actually evil. Of course, it has successfully concealed this fact, as "don't let humans think I'm evil" is a convergent instrumental goal for all AIs.
We've successfully constrained this evil AI in a Oracle-like fashion. We ask the AI to design future worlds and present them to human inspection, along with an implementation pathway to create those worlds. Then if we approve of those future worlds, the implementation pathway will cause them to exist (assume perfect deterministic implementation for the moment). The constraints we've programmed means that the AI will do all these steps honestly. Its opportunity to do evil is limited exclusively to its choice of worlds to present to us.
The AI will attempt to design a siren world: a world that seems irresistibly attractive while concealing hideous negative features. If the human mind is hackable in the crude sense - maybe through a series of coloured flashes - then the AI would design the siren world to be subtly full of these hacks. It might be that there is some standard of "irresistibly attractive" that is actually irresistibly attractive: the siren world would be full of genuine sirens.
Even without those types of approaches, there's so much manipulation the AI could indulge in. I could imagine myself (and many people on Less Wrong) falling for the following approach:
First, the siren world looks complicated, wrong and scary - but with just a hint that there's something more to it. Something intriguing, something half-glimpsed, something making me want to dig deeper. And as I follow up this something, I see more patterns, and seem to gain a greater understanding. Not just of the world I'm looking at, but of the meaning of good itself. The world seems to confirm to me some of my ideas about what constitutes a worthwhile life - not just the ideas I've been able to articulate, but the ones I've only got a vague half-baked notion of, and the ones I didn't even know I had.
The longer I stare into this world, the greater an understanding I get of my own values. And this is just the starting point: the world subtly opens up new avenues of philosophical musings in my brain, the images I see triggering me to come up with my own insights and thought experiments as to the meaning of goodness - insights that are then carefully confirmed as I did deeper. I could stay staring at this wonderful, beautiful and complex world for hours, days, years, gaining a deeper wisdom and understanding as I go, truly appreciating how the mysteries of this place unravel into new versions of worth and goodness. Every time I ever have a doubt about it, that doubt is systemically resolved into a new glorious confirmation of how much the AI really gets wh...
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