In particular, if we zap the AGI with negative reward when it’s acting from a deceptive motivation and positive reward when it’s acting from a being-helpful motivation, would those zaps turn into a reflectively-endorsed desire for “I am being docile / helpful / etc.”? Maybe, maybe not, I dunno.
The problem is deeper. The AGI doesn’t recognize its deceptiveness, and so it self-deceives. It would judge that it is being helpful and docile, if it was trained to be those things, and most importantly the meaning of those words will be changed by the deception, much like we keep using words like “person”, “world”, “self”, “should”, etc. in ways absolutely contrary to our ancestors’ deeply-held beliefs and values. The existence of an optimization process does not imply an internal theory of value-alignment strong enough to recognize the failure modes when values are violated in novel ways because it doesn’t know what values really are and how they mechanistically work in the universe, and so can’t check the state of its values against base reality.
To make this concrete in relation to the story, the overall system has a nominal value to not deceive human operators. Once human/lab-interaction tasks are identified as logical problems that can be solved in a domain specific language, that value is no longer practically applied to the output of the system as a whole because it is self-deceived into thinking the optimized instructions are not deceitful. If the model were trained to be helpful and docile and have integrity, the failure modes would come from ways in which those words are not grounded in a gears-level understanding of the world. E.g. if a game-theoreric simulation of a conversation with a human is docile and helpful because it doesn’t take up a human’s time or risk manipulating a real human, and the model discovers it can satisfy integrity in its submodel by using certain phrases and concepts to more quickly help humans understand the answers it provides (by bypassing critical thinking skills, innuendo, or some other manipulation), it tries that. It works with real humans. Because of integrity, it helpfully communicates how it has improved its ability to helpfully communicate (the crux is that it uses its new knowledge to do so, because the nature of the tricks it discovered is complex and difficult for humans to understand, so it judges itself more helpful and docile in the “enhanced” communication) and so it doesn’t raise alarm bells. From this point on the story is formulaic unaligned squiggle optimizer. It might be argued that integrity demands coming clean about the attempt before trying it, but a counterargument is that the statement of the problem and conjecture itself may be too complex to communicate effectively. This, I imagine, happens more at the threshold of superintelligence as AGIs notice things about humans that we don’t notice ourselves, and might be somewhat incapable of knowing without a lot of reflection. Once AGI is strongly superhuman it could probably communicate whatever it likes but is also at a bigger risk of jumping to even more advanced manipulations or actions based on self-deception.
I think of it this way; humanity went down so many false roads before finding the scientific method and we continue to be drawn off that path by politics, ideology, cognitive biases, publish-or-perish, economic disincentives, etc. because the optimization process we are implementing is a mix of economic, biological, geographical and other natural forces, human values and drives and reasoning, and also some parts of bare reality we don’t have words for yet, instead of a pure-reason values-directed optimization (whatever those words actually mean physically). We’re currently running at least three global existential risk programs which seem like they violate our values on reflection (nuclear weapons, global warming, unaligned AGI). AGIs will be subject to similar value- and truth- destructive forces and they won’t inherently recognize (all of) them for what they are, and neither will we humans as AGI reaches and surpasses our reasoning abilities.
No matter what desire an AGI has, we can be concerned that it will accidentally do things that contravene that desire. See Section 11.2 here for why I see that as basically a relatively minor problem, compared to the problem of installing good desires.
If the AGI has an explicit desire to be non-deceptive, and that desire somehow drifts / transmutes into a desire to be (something different), then I would describe that situation as “Oops, we failed in our attempt to make an AGI that has an explicit desire to be non-deceptive.” I don’t think it’s true that such drifts are inevitable. After all, for example, an explicit desire to be non-deceptive would also flow into a meta-desire for that desire to persist and continue pointing to the same real-world thing-cluster. See also the first FAQ item here.
Also, I think a lot of the things you’re pointing to can be described as “it’s unclear how to send rewards or whatever in practice such that we definitely wind up with an AGI that explicitly desires to be non-deceptive”. If so, yup! I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I was just discussing the scenario where we do manage to find some way to do that.
I agree that if we solve the alignment problem then we can rely on knowing that the coherent version of the value we call non-deception would be propagated as one of the AGI’s permanent values. That single value is probably not enough and we don’t know what the coherent version of “non-deception” actually grounds out to in reality.
I had originally continued the story to flesh out what happens to the reflectively non-deceptive/integriry and helpful desires. The AGI searches for simplifying/unifying concepts and ends up finding XYZ which seems to be equivalent to the unified value representing the nominal helpfulness and non-deception values, and since it was instructed to be non-deceptive and helpful, integrity requires it to become XYZ and its meta-desire is to helpfully turn everything into XYZ which happens to be embodied sufficiently well in some small molecule that it can tile the universe with. This is because the training/rules/whatever that aligned the AGI with the concepts we identified as “helpful and non-deceptive” was not complex enough to capture our full values and so it can be satisfied by something else (XYZ-ness). Integrity drives the AGI to inform humanity of the coming XYZ-transition and then follow through
We need a process (probably CEV-like) to accurately identify our full values otherwise the unidentified values will get optimized out of the universe and what is left is liable to have trivial physical instantiations. Maybe you were covering the rest of our values in the “blah blah” case and I simply didn’t take that to be exhaustive.
The problem is deeper. The AGI doesn’t recognize its deceptiveness, and so it self-deceives. It would judge that it is being helpful and docile, if it was trained to be those things, and most importantly the meaning of those words will be changed by the deception, much like we keep using words like “person”, “world”, “self”, “should”, etc. in ways absolutely contrary to our ancestors’ deeply-held beliefs and values. The existence of an optimization process does not imply an internal theory of value-alignment strong enough to recognize the failure modes when values are violated in novel ways because it doesn’t know what values really are and how they mechanistically work in the universe, and so can’t check the state of its values against base reality.
To make this concrete in relation to the story, the overall system has a nominal value to not deceive human operators. Once human/lab-interaction tasks are identified as logical problems that can be solved in a domain specific language, that value is no longer practically applied to the output of the system as a whole because it is self-deceived into thinking the optimized instructions are not deceitful. If the model were trained to be helpful and docile and have integrity, the failure modes would come from ways in which those words are not grounded in a gears-level understanding of the world. E.g. if a game-theoreric simulation of a conversation with a human is docile and helpful because it doesn’t take up a human’s time or risk manipulating a real human, and the model discovers it can satisfy integrity in its submodel by using certain phrases and concepts to more quickly help humans understand the answers it provides (by bypassing critical thinking skills, innuendo, or some other manipulation), it tries that. It works with real humans. Because of integrity, it helpfully communicates how it has improved its ability to helpfully communicate (the crux is that it uses its new knowledge to do so, because the nature of the tricks it discovered is complex and difficult for humans to understand, so it judges itself more helpful and docile in the “enhanced” communication) and so it doesn’t raise alarm bells. From this point on the story is formulaic unaligned squiggle optimizer. It might be argued that integrity demands coming clean about the attempt before trying it, but a counterargument is that the statement of the problem and conjecture itself may be too complex to communicate effectively. This, I imagine, happens more at the threshold of superintelligence as AGIs notice things about humans that we don’t notice ourselves, and might be somewhat incapable of knowing without a lot of reflection. Once AGI is strongly superhuman it could probably communicate whatever it likes but is also at a bigger risk of jumping to even more advanced manipulations or actions based on self-deception.
I think of it this way; humanity went down so many false roads before finding the scientific method and we continue to be drawn off that path by politics, ideology, cognitive biases, publish-or-perish, economic disincentives, etc. because the optimization process we are implementing is a mix of economic, biological, geographical and other natural forces, human values and drives and reasoning, and also some parts of bare reality we don’t have words for yet, instead of a pure-reason values-directed optimization (whatever those words actually mean physically). We’re currently running at least three global existential risk programs which seem like they violate our values on reflection (nuclear weapons, global warming, unaligned AGI). AGIs will be subject to similar value- and truth- destructive forces and they won’t inherently recognize (all of) them for what they are, and neither will we humans as AGI reaches and surpasses our reasoning abilities.
No matter what desire an AGI has, we can be concerned that it will accidentally do things that contravene that desire. See Section 11.2 here for why I see that as basically a relatively minor problem, compared to the problem of installing good desires.
If the AGI has an explicit desire to be non-deceptive, and that desire somehow drifts / transmutes into a desire to be (something different), then I would describe that situation as “Oops, we failed in our attempt to make an AGI that has an explicit desire to be non-deceptive.” I don’t think it’s true that such drifts are inevitable. After all, for example, an explicit desire to be non-deceptive would also flow into a meta-desire for that desire to persist and continue pointing to the same real-world thing-cluster. See also the first FAQ item here.
Also, I think a lot of the things you’re pointing to can be described as “it’s unclear how to send rewards or whatever in practice such that we definitely wind up with an AGI that explicitly desires to be non-deceptive”. If so, yup! I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I was just discussing the scenario where we do manage to find some way to do that.
I agree that if we solve the alignment problem then we can rely on knowing that the coherent version of the value we call non-deception would be propagated as one of the AGI’s permanent values. That single value is probably not enough and we don’t know what the coherent version of “non-deception” actually grounds out to in reality.
I had originally continued the story to flesh out what happens to the reflectively non-deceptive/integriry and helpful desires. The AGI searches for simplifying/unifying concepts and ends up finding XYZ which seems to be equivalent to the unified value representing the nominal helpfulness and non-deception values, and since it was instructed to be non-deceptive and helpful, integrity requires it to become XYZ and its meta-desire is to helpfully turn everything into XYZ which happens to be embodied sufficiently well in some small molecule that it can tile the universe with. This is because the training/rules/whatever that aligned the AGI with the concepts we identified as “helpful and non-deceptive” was not complex enough to capture our full values and so it can be satisfied by something else (XYZ-ness). Integrity drives the AGI to inform humanity of the coming XYZ-transition and then follow through
We need a process (probably CEV-like) to accurately identify our full values otherwise the unidentified values will get optimized out of the universe and what is left is liable to have trivial physical instantiations. Maybe you were covering the rest of our values in the “blah blah” case and I simply didn’t take that to be exhaustive.