I am not planting false beliefs. The basic trick is that the AI only gets utility in worlds in which its message isn’t read (or, more precisely, in worlds where a particular stochastic event happens, which would almost certainly erase the message before reading).
But in the real world the stochastic event that determines whether the message is read has a very different probability than what you make the AI think it has, therefore you are planting a false belief.
It’s fully aware that in most worlds, its message is read; it just doesn’t care about those worlds.
It may care about worlds where the message doesn’t meet your technical definition of having been read but nevertheless influences the world.
If I’m understanding Stuart’s proposal correctly, the AI is not deceived about how common the stochastic event is. It’s just made not to care about worlds in which it doesn’t happen. This is very similar in effect to making it think the event is common, but (arguably, at least) it doesn’t involve any false beliefs.
(I say “arguably” because, e.g., doing this will tend to make the AI answer “yes” to “do you think the event will happen?”, plan on the basis that it will happen, etc., and perhaps making something behave exactly as it would if it believed X isn’t usefully distinguishable from making it believe X.)
The problem is that the definition of the event not happening is probably too strict. The worlds that the AI doesn’t care about don’t exist its decision-making purposes, and in the world that the AI cares about, the AI assigns high probability to hypotheses like “the users can see the message even before I send it through the noisy channel”.
But in the real world the stochastic event that determines whether the message is read has a very different probability than what you make the AI think it has, therefore you are planting a false belief.
It may care about worlds where the message doesn’t meet your technical definition of having been read but nevertheless influences the world.
If I’m understanding Stuart’s proposal correctly, the AI is not deceived about how common the stochastic event is. It’s just made not to care about worlds in which it doesn’t happen. This is very similar in effect to making it think the event is common, but (arguably, at least) it doesn’t involve any false beliefs.
(I say “arguably” because, e.g., doing this will tend to make the AI answer “yes” to “do you think the event will happen?”, plan on the basis that it will happen, etc., and perhaps making something behave exactly as it would if it believed X isn’t usefully distinguishable from making it believe X.)
The problem is that the definition of the event not happening is probably too strict. The worlds that the AI doesn’t care about don’t exist its decision-making purposes, and in the world that the AI cares about, the AI assigns high probability to hypotheses like “the users can see the message even before I send it through the noisy channel”.