Yes to both. I don’t think Cannell is correct about an implementation of what he said being a good idea, even if it was a certified implementation, and I also don’t think his idea is close to ready to implement. Agent membranes still seem at all interesting, right now as far as I know the most interesting work is coming from the Levin lab (tufts university, michael levin), but I’m not happy with any of it for nailing down what we mean by aligning an arbitrarily powerful mind to care about the actual beings in its environment in a strongly durable way.
it’s not directly on alignment, but it’s relevant to understanding agent membranes. understanding his work seems useful as a strong exemplar of what one needs to describe with a formal theory of agents and such. particularly interesting is https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31920779/
It’s not the result we’re looking for, but it’s inspiring in useful ways.
Do you mean this? Empowerment is (almost) All We Need
and this: Agent membranes/boundaries and formalizing “safety”
Yes to both. I don’t think Cannell is correct about an implementation of what he said being a good idea, even if it was a certified implementation, and I also don’t think his idea is close to ready to implement. Agent membranes still seem at all interesting, right now as far as I know the most interesting work is coming from the Levin lab (tufts university, michael levin), but I’m not happy with any of it for nailing down what we mean by aligning an arbitrarily powerful mind to care about the actual beings in its environment in a strongly durable way.
I’m not clear about what research by Michael Levin you mean. I found him mentioned here: «Boundaries», Part 3b: Alignment problems in terms of boundaries but his research seems to be about cellular computation, not related to alignment.
https://www.drmichaellevin.org/research/
https://www.drmichaellevin.org/publications/
it’s not directly on alignment, but it’s relevant to understanding agent membranes. understanding his work seems useful as a strong exemplar of what one needs to describe with a formal theory of agents and such. particularly interesting is https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31920779/
It’s not the result we’re looking for, but it’s inspiring in useful ways.