I think what I’m getting at is more general than specifically talking about resources, I’m more getting at the degree of freedom in the problem description that lets you frame anything as technically optimizing something at a distance i.e. in ‘Utility Maximization = Description Length Minimization’ you can take any system, find its long-term and long-distance effects on some other region of space-time, and find a coding-scheme where those particular states have the shortest descriptions. The description length of the universe will by construction get minimized. Obviously this just corresponds to one of those (to us) very unnatural-looking “utility functions” over universe-histories or w/e
If we’re first fixing the coding scheme then this seems to me to be equivalent to constraining the kinds of properties we’re allowing as viable targets of optimization
I guess one way of looking at it is I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a system as being an optimizer/not an optimizer intrinsically. It’s a property of a system relative to a coding scheme/set of interesting properties/resources, everything is an optimizer relative to some encoding scheme. And all of the actual, empirical scariness of AI comes from how close the encoding scheme that by-definition makes it an optimizer is to our native encoding scheme—as you point out they’ll probably have some overlap but I don’t think that itself is scary
All possible encoding schemes / universal priors differ from each other by at most a finite prefix. You might think this doesn’t achieve much, since the length of the prefix can be in principle unbounded; but in practice, the length of the prefix (or rather, the prior itself) is constrained by a system’s physical implementation. There are some encoding schemes which neither you nor any other physical entity will ever be able to implement, and so for the purposes of description length minimization these are off the table. And of the encoding schemes that remain on the table, virtually all of them will behave identically with respect to the description lengths they assign to “natural” versus “unnatural” optimization criteria.
I think what I’m getting at is more general than specifically talking about resources, I’m more getting at the degree of freedom in the problem description that lets you frame anything as technically optimizing something at a distance i.e. in ‘Utility Maximization = Description Length Minimization’ you can take any system, find its long-term and long-distance effects on some other region of space-time, and find a coding-scheme where those particular states have the shortest descriptions. The description length of the universe will by construction get minimized. Obviously this just corresponds to one of those (to us) very unnatural-looking “utility functions” over universe-histories or w/e
If we’re first fixing the coding scheme then this seems to me to be equivalent to constraining the kinds of properties we’re allowing as viable targets of optimization
I guess one way of looking at it is I don’t think it makes sense to talk about a system as being an optimizer/not an optimizer intrinsically. It’s a property of a system relative to a coding scheme/set of interesting properties/resources, everything is an optimizer relative to some encoding scheme. And all of the actual, empirical scariness of AI comes from how close the encoding scheme that by-definition makes it an optimizer is to our native encoding scheme—as you point out they’ll probably have some overlap but I don’t think that itself is scary
All possible encoding schemes / universal priors differ from each other by at most a finite prefix. You might think this doesn’t achieve much, since the length of the prefix can be in principle unbounded; but in practice, the length of the prefix (or rather, the prior itself) is constrained by a system’s physical implementation. There are some encoding schemes which neither you nor any other physical entity will ever be able to implement, and so for the purposes of description length minimization these are off the table. And of the encoding schemes that remain on the table, virtually all of them will behave identically with respect to the description lengths they assign to “natural” versus “unnatural” optimization criteria.