can it maintain its own boundary over time, in the face of environmental disruption? Some agents are much better at this than others.
I really wish there was more attention paid to this idea of robustness to environmental disruption. It also comes up in discussions of optimization more generally (not just agents). This robustness seems to me like the most risk-relevant part of all this, and seems like it might be more important than the idea of a boundary. Maybe maintaining a boundary is a particularly good way for a process to protect itself from disruption, but I notice some doubt that this idea is most directly getting at what is dangerous about intelligent/optimizing systems, whereas robustness to environmental disruption feels like it has the potential to get at something broader that could unify both agent based risk narratives and non-agent based risk narratives.
I really wish there was more attention paid to this idea of robustness to environmental disruption. It also comes up in discussions of optimization more generally (not just agents). This robustness seems to me like the most risk-relevant part of all this, and seems like it might be more important than the idea of a boundary. Maybe maintaining a boundary is a particularly good way for a process to protect itself from disruption, but I notice some doubt that this idea is most directly getting at what is dangerous about intelligent/optimizing systems, whereas robustness to environmental disruption feels like it has the potential to get at something broader that could unify both agent based risk narratives and non-agent based risk narratives.