The main thing this proposal is intended to do is to get past the barriers MIRI found in their old work on the shutdown problem. In particular, in a toy problem basically-identical to the one MIRI used, we want an agent which:
Does not want to manipulate the shutdown button
Does respond to the shutdown button
Does want to make any child-agents it creates responsive-but-not-manipulative to the shutdown button, recursively (i.e. including children-of-children etc)
If I understand correctly, this is roughly the combination of features which MIRI had the most trouble achieving simultaneously.
From a quick read, your proposal seems closely related to Jessica Taylor’s causal-counterfactual utility indifference. Ryan Carey and I also recently had a paper formalising some similar ideas, with some further literature review https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.19861