I’ve found it difficult to think of a more robust/satisfying solution to manipulation (in this context). It seems like agents just will have incentives to manipulate each other in a multi-polar world, and it’s hard to prevent that.
Fundamentally you need some way of distinguishing between “manipulation” and “not manipulation”. The first guess of “manipulation = affecting the human’s brain” is not a good definition, as it basically prevents all communication whatsoever. I haven’t seen any simple formal-ish definitions that seem remotely correct.
(There’s of course the approach where you try to learn the human concept of manipulation from human feedback, and train your system to avoid that, but that’s pretty different from a formal definition based on causal diagrams.)
I liked how Rhy’s definition of manipulation specifically included the requirement of the target getting lower utility.
Therefore something like “manipulation = affecting the human’s brain in a way that will reduce their expected utility” does not classify all communication as manipulation.
As Richard points out, my definition of manipulation is “I influence your actions in a way that causes you to get lower utility”. (And we can similarly define cooperation except with the target getting higher utility.) Can send you the formal version if you’re interested.
I continue to think that this classifies all communication as manipulation. Every action reduces someone’s expected utility, from Omega’s perspective.
I guess if you communicate with only one person, and you’re only looking at your effects on that person’s utility, then this does not classify all communication as manipulation. So maybe I should say that it classifies almost all communication-to-groups as manipulation.
Fundamentally you need some way of distinguishing between “manipulation” and “not manipulation”. The first guess of “manipulation = affecting the human’s brain” is not a good definition, as it basically prevents all communication whatsoever. I haven’t seen any simple formal-ish definitions that seem remotely correct.
(There’s of course the approach where you try to learn the human concept of manipulation from human feedback, and train your system to avoid that, but that’s pretty different from a formal definition based on causal diagrams.)
I liked how Rhy’s definition of manipulation specifically included the requirement of the target getting lower utility.
Therefore something like “manipulation = affecting the human’s brain in a way that will reduce their expected utility” does not classify all communication as manipulation.
As Richard points out, my definition of manipulation is “I influence your actions in a way that causes you to get lower utility”. (And we can similarly define cooperation except with the target getting higher utility.) Can send you the formal version if you’re interested.
I continue to think that this classifies all communication as manipulation. Every action reduces someone’s expected utility, from Omega’s perspective.
I guess if you communicate with only one person, and you’re only looking at your effects on that person’s utility, then this does not classify all communication as manipulation. So maybe I should say that it classifies almost all communication-to-groups as manipulation.