Bostrom’s Hail Mary approach involves the AI entirely gathering its information about what other AIs would want from its own mental modeling (p199/294 footnote 25). It seems strange then that it could do this if it thought there really was another AI out there, but not if it thought there were not. Why can’t it just do what it would do if there were one?
I agree, the actual local existence of other AIs shouldn’t make a difference, and the approach could work equally either way. As Bostrom says on page 198, no communication is required.
Nevertheless, for the process to yield a useful result, some possible civilization would have to build a non-HM AI. That civilization might be (locally speaking) hypothetical or simulated, but either way the HM-implementing AI needs to think of it to delegate values. I believe that’s what footnote 25 gets at: From a superrational point of view, if every possible civilization (or every one imaginable to the AI we build) at this point in time chooses to use an HM approach to value coding, it can’t work.
If all civilizations HailMary to value-code they would all find out the others did the same and because the game doesn’t end there, in round two they would decide to use a different approach.
Possibly, like undifferentiated blastula cells use an environmental asymmetric element (gravity) to decide to start differentiating, AGI’s could use local information to decide whether they should HailMary again on the second hypothetical round or if they should be the ones deciding for themselves (say information about where you are located in your Hubble volume, or how much available energy there still is in your light cone or something).
That depends on whether the AGI is told (and accepts) to HailMary once, or to HailMary to completion, or something in between. It also depends on which decision theory the AGI uses to decide I believe. There seem to be, for a large ensemble of decisions, a one-round version of the many-round decision (“No Regrets” Arntzenius2007, “TDT” Yudkowksy2010, “UDT” WeiDai 20xx).
Bostrom’s Hail Mary approach involves the AI entirely gathering its information about what other AIs would want from its own mental modeling (p199/294 footnote 25). It seems strange then that it could do this if it thought there really was another AI out there, but not if it thought there were not. Why can’t it just do what it would do if there were one?
I agree, the actual local existence of other AIs shouldn’t make a difference, and the approach could work equally either way. As Bostrom says on page 198, no communication is required.
Nevertheless, for the process to yield a useful result, some possible civilization would have to build a non-HM AI. That civilization might be (locally speaking) hypothetical or simulated, but either way the HM-implementing AI needs to think of it to delegate values. I believe that’s what footnote 25 gets at: From a superrational point of view, if every possible civilization (or every one imaginable to the AI we build) at this point in time chooses to use an HM approach to value coding, it can’t work.
If all civilizations HailMary to value-code they would all find out the others did the same and because the game doesn’t end there, in round two they would decide to use a different approach. Possibly, like undifferentiated blastula cells use an environmental asymmetric element (gravity) to decide to start differentiating, AGI’s could use local information to decide whether they should HailMary again on the second hypothetical round or if they should be the ones deciding for themselves (say information about where you are located in your Hubble volume, or how much available energy there still is in your light cone or something).
Isn’t it the civilization not the AGI that will need to decide what to do?
That depends on whether the AGI is told (and accepts) to HailMary once, or to HailMary to completion, or something in between. It also depends on which decision theory the AGI uses to decide I believe. There seem to be, for a large ensemble of decisions, a one-round version of the many-round decision (“No Regrets” Arntzenius2007, “TDT” Yudkowksy2010, “UDT” WeiDai 20xx).