This is a risk worth considering, yes. It’s possible in principle to avoid this problem by “committing” (to the extent that humans can do this) to both (1) train the agent to make the desired tradeoffs between the surrogate goal and original goal, and (2) nottrain the agent to use a more hawkish bargaining policy than it would’ve had without surrogate goal training. (And to the extent that humans can’t make this commitment, i.e., we make honest mistakes in (2), the other agent doesn’t have an incentive to punish those mistakes.)
If the developers do both these things credibly—and it’s an open research question how feasible this is—surrogate goals should provide a Pareto improvement for the two agents (not a rigorous claim). Safe Pareto improvements are a generalization of this idea.
Can the strategy of “using surrogate goals to deflect threats” be countered by an enemy agent that learns your true goals and credibly precommits to always defecting (i.e., Prisoner’s Dilemma style) if you deploy an agent against it with goals that produce sufficiently different cooperative bargaining equilibria than your true goals would?
This is a risk worth considering, yes. It’s possible in principle to avoid this problem by “committing” (to the extent that humans can do this) to both (1) train the agent to make the desired tradeoffs between the surrogate goal and original goal, and (2) not train the agent to use a more hawkish bargaining policy than it would’ve had without surrogate goal training. (And to the extent that humans can’t make this commitment, i.e., we make honest mistakes in (2), the other agent doesn’t have an incentive to punish those mistakes.)
If the developers do both these things credibly—and it’s an open research question how feasible this is—surrogate goals should provide a Pareto improvement for the two agents (not a rigorous claim). Safe Pareto improvements are a generalization of this idea.