Establishing what humans really want, in all circumstances including exotic ones, and given that humans are very hackable, seems to be the core problem. Is this actually easier than saying “assume the first AI has a friendly utility function”?
I don’t know what you really want, even in mundane circumstances. Nevertheless, it’s easy to talk about a motivational state in which I try my best to help you get what you want, and this would be sufficient to avert catastrophe. This would remain true if you were an alien with whom I share no cognitive machinery.
An example I often give is that a supervised learner is basically trying to do what I want, while usually being very weak. It may generalize catastrophically to unseen situations (which is a key problem), and it may not be very competent, but on the training distribution it’s not going to kill me except by incompetence.
But this could happen even if you train your agent using the “correct” reward function. And conversely, if we take as given an AI that can robustly maximize a given reward function, then it seems like my schemes don’t have this generalization problem.
So it seems like this isn’t a problem with the reward function, it’s just the general problem of doing robust/reliable ML. It seems like that can be cleanly factored out of the kind of reward engineering I’m discussing in the ALBA post. Does that seem right?
(It could certainly be the case that robust/reliable ML is the real meat of aligning model-free RL systems. Indeed, I think that’s a more common view in the ML community. Or, it could be the case that any ML system will fail to generalize in some catastrophic way, in which case the remedy is to make less use of learning.)
It seems like that can be cleanly factored out of the kind of reward engineering I’m discussing in the ALBA post. Does that seem right?
That doesn’t seem right to me. If there isn’t a problem with the reward function, then ALBA seems unnecessarily complicated. Conversely, if there is a problem, we might be able to use something like ALBA to try and fix it (this is why I was more positive about it in practice).
Establishing what humans really want, in all circumstances including exotic ones, and given that humans are very hackable, seems to be the core problem. Is this actually easier than saying “assume the first AI has a friendly utility function”?
I don’t know what you really want, even in mundane circumstances. Nevertheless, it’s easy to talk about a motivational state in which I try my best to help you get what you want, and this would be sufficient to avert catastrophe. This would remain true if you were an alien with whom I share no cognitive machinery.
An example I often give is that a supervised learner is basically trying to do what I want, while usually being very weak. It may generalize catastrophically to unseen situations (which is a key problem), and it may not be very competent, but on the training distribution it’s not going to kill me except by incompetence.
That probably summarises my whole objection ^_^
But this could happen even if you train your agent using the “correct” reward function. And conversely, if we take as given an AI that can robustly maximize a given reward function, then it seems like my schemes don’t have this generalization problem.
So it seems like this isn’t a problem with the reward function, it’s just the general problem of doing robust/reliable ML. It seems like that can be cleanly factored out of the kind of reward engineering I’m discussing in the ALBA post. Does that seem right?
(It could certainly be the case that robust/reliable ML is the real meat of aligning model-free RL systems. Indeed, I think that’s a more common view in the ML community. Or, it could be the case that any ML system will fail to generalize in some catastrophic way, in which case the remedy is to make less use of learning.)
That doesn’t seem right to me. If there isn’t a problem with the reward function, then ALBA seems unnecessarily complicated. Conversely, if there is a problem, we might be able to use something like ALBA to try and fix it (this is why I was more positive about it in practice).