Rohin Shah comments on What are we assuming about utility functions?

[Rohin Shah]

the discussion was whether those agents will be broadly goal-directed at all, a weaker condition than being a utility maximizer

Uh, that chapter was claiming that “being a utility maximizer” is vacuous, and therefore “goal-directed” is a stronger condition than “being a utility maximizer”.

[Grue_Slinky]

Whoops, mea culpa on that one! Deleted and changed to:

the main post there pointed out that seemingly anything can be trivially modeled as being a “utility maximizer” (further discussion here), whereas only some intelligent agents can be described as being “goal-directed” (as defined in this post), and the latter is a more useful concept for reasoning about AI safety.