Thanks for these thoughts about the causal agenda. I basically agree with you on the facts, though I have a more favourable interpretation of how they bear on the potential of the causal incentives agenda. I’ve paraphrased the three bullet points, and responded in reverse order:
3) Many important incentives are not captured by the approach—e.g. sometimes an agent has an incentive to influence a variable, even if that variable does not cause reward attainment.
-> Agreed. We’re starting to study “side-effect incentives” (improved name pending), which have this property. We’re still figuring out whether we should just care about the union of SE incentives and control incentives, or whether SE or when, SE incentives should be considered less dangerous. Whether the causal style of incentive analysis captures much of what we care about, I think will be borne out by applying it and alternatives to a bunch of safety problems.
2) sometimes we need more specific quantities, than just D affects A.
-> Agreed. We’ve privately discussed directional quantities like “do(D=d) causes A=a” as being more safety-relevant, and are happy to hear other ideas.
1) eliminating all control-incentives seems unrealistic
-> Strongly agree it’s infeasibile to remove CIs on all variables. My more modest goal would be to prove that for particular variables (or classes of variables) such as a shut down button, or a human’s values, we can either: 1) prove how to remove control (+ side-effect) incentives, or 2) why this is impossible, given realistic assumptions. If (2), then that theoretical case could justify allocation of resources to learning-oriented approaches.
Overall, I concede that we haven’t engaged much on safety issues in the last year. Partly, it’s that the projects have had to fit within people’s PhDs. Which will also be true this year. But having some of the framework stuff behind us, we should still be able to study safety more, and gain a sense of how addressable concerns like these are, and to what extent causal decision problems/games are a really useful ontology for AI safety.
Thanks for these thoughts about the causal agenda. I basically agree with you on the facts, though I have a more favourable interpretation of how they bear on the potential of the causal incentives agenda. I’ve paraphrased the three bullet points, and responded in reverse order:
3) Many important incentives are not captured by the approach—e.g. sometimes an agent has an incentive to influence a variable, even if that variable does not cause reward attainment.
-> Agreed. We’re starting to study “side-effect incentives” (improved name pending), which have this property. We’re still figuring out whether we should just care about the union of SE incentives and control incentives, or whether SE or when, SE incentives should be considered less dangerous. Whether the causal style of incentive analysis captures much of what we care about, I think will be borne out by applying it and alternatives to a bunch of safety problems.
2) sometimes we need more specific quantities, than just D affects A.
-> Agreed. We’ve privately discussed directional quantities like “do(D=d) causes A=a” as being more safety-relevant, and are happy to hear other ideas.
1) eliminating all control-incentives seems unrealistic
-> Strongly agree it’s infeasibile to remove CIs on all variables. My more modest goal would be to prove that for particular variables (or classes of variables) such as a shut down button, or a human’s values, we can either: 1) prove how to remove control (+ side-effect) incentives, or 2) why this is impossible, given realistic assumptions. If (2), then that theoretical case could justify allocation of resources to learning-oriented approaches.
Overall, I concede that we haven’t engaged much on safety issues in the last year. Partly, it’s that the projects have had to fit within people’s PhDs. Which will also be true this year. But having some of the framework stuff behind us, we should still be able to study safety more, and gain a sense of how addressable concerns like these are, and to what extent causal decision problems/games are a really useful ontology for AI safety.