some types of bad (or bad on some people’s preferences) outcomes from markets can be thought of as missing components of the objective function that those markets are systematically optimizing for.
This framing doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. From my perspective, markets are unlike AI in that there isn’t a place in a market’s “source code” where you can set or change an objective function. A market is just a group of people, each pursuing their own interests, conducting individual voluntary trades. Bad outcomes of markets come not from wrong objective functions given by some designers, but are instead caused by game theoretic dynamics that make it difficult or impossible for a group of people pursuing their own interests to achieve Pareto efficiency. (See The Second Best for some pointers in this direction.)
Can you try to explain your perspective to someone like me, or point me to any existing writings on this?
To us it seems very likely that both kinds of bad outcomes occur at some rate, and the goal of the AI Objectives Institute is to reduce rates of both market and regulatory failures.
There is a big literature in economics on both market and government/regulatory failures. How familiar are you with it, and how does your approach compare with the academic mainstream on these topics?
This framing doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. From my perspective, markets are unlike AI in that there isn’t a place in a market’s “source code” where you can set or change an objective function. A market is just a group of people, each pursuing their own interests, conducting individual voluntary trades. Bad outcomes of markets come not from wrong objective functions given by some designers, but are instead caused by game theoretic dynamics that make it difficult or impossible for a group of people pursuing their own interests to achieve Pareto efficiency. (See The Second Best for some pointers in this direction.)
Can you try to explain your perspective to someone like me, or point me to any existing writings on this?
There is a big literature in economics on both market and government/regulatory failures. How familiar are you with it, and how does your approach compare with the academic mainstream on these topics?