Well, any process that picks actions ends up equivalent to some criterion, even if only “actions likely to be picked by this process.” The deal with agents and agent-like things is that they pick actions based on their modeled consequences. Basically anything that picks actions in different way (or, more technically, a way that’s complicated to explain in terms of planning) is an other-izer to some degree. Though maybe this is drift from the original usage, which wanted nice properties like reflective stability etc.
The example of the day is language models. GPT doesn’t pick its next sentence by modeling the world and predicting the consequences. Bam, other-izer. Neither design nor search.
Anyhow, back on topic, I agree that “helpfulness to humans” is a very complicated thing. But maybe there’s some simpler notion of “helpful to the AI” that results in design-like other-izing that loses some of the helpfulness-to-humans properties, but retains some of the things that make design seem safer than search even if you never looked at the “stories.”
Well, any process that picks actions ends up equivalent to some criterion, even if only “actions likely to be picked by this process.” The deal with agents and agent-like things is that they pick actions based on their modeled consequences. Basically anything that picks actions in different way (or, more technically, a way that’s complicated to explain in terms of planning) is an other-izer to some degree. Though maybe this is drift from the original usage, which wanted nice properties like reflective stability etc.
The example of the day is language models. GPT doesn’t pick its next sentence by modeling the world and predicting the consequences. Bam, other-izer. Neither design nor search.
Anyhow, back on topic, I agree that “helpfulness to humans” is a very complicated thing. But maybe there’s some simpler notion of “helpful to the AI” that results in design-like other-izing that loses some of the helpfulness-to-humans properties, but retains some of the things that make design seem safer than search even if you never looked at the “stories.”