In this post I outline every post I could find that meaningfully connects the concept of «Boundaries/Membranes» (tag) with AI safety.^[1] This seems to be a booming subtopic: interest has picked up substantially within the past year.

Update (2023 Dec): we're now running a workshop on this topic!

Perhaps most notably, Davidad includes the concept in his Open Agency Architecture for Safe Transformative AI alignment paradigm. For a preview of the salience of this approach, see this comment by Davidad (2023 Jan):

“defend the boundaries of existing sentient beings,” which is my current favourite. It’s nowhere near as ambitious or idiosyncratic as “human values”, yet nowhere near as anti-natural or buck-passing as corrigibility.

This post also compiles work from Andrew Critch, Scott Garrabrant, Mark Miller, and others. But first I will recap what «Boundaries» are:

«Boundaries» definition recap:

You can see «Boundaries» Sequence for a longer explanation, but I will excerpt from a more recent post by Andrew Critch, 2023 March:

By boundaries, I just mean the approximate causal separation of regions in some kind of physical space (e.g., spacetime) or abstract space (e.g., cyberspace). Here are some examples from my «Boundaries» Sequence:
a cell membrane (separates the inside of a cell from the outside);
a person's skin (separates the inside of their body from the outside);
a fence around a family's yard (separates the family's place of living-together from neighbors and others);
a digital firewall around a local area network (separates the LAN and its users from the rest of the internet);
a sustained disassociation of social groups (separates the two groups from each other)
a national border (separates a state from neighboring states or international waters).

Also, beware:

When I say boundary, I don't just mean an arbitrary constraint or social norm.

Update: see Agent membranes and causal distance for a better exposition of the agent membranes/boundaries idea.

Posts & researchers that link «Boundaries» and AI safety

All bolding in the excerpts below is mine.

Davidad’s OAA

Saliently, Davidad uses «Boundaries» for one of the four hypotheses he outlines in An Open Agency Architecture for Safe Transformative AI (2022 Dec)

Deontic Sufficiency Hypothesis: There exists a human-understandable set of features of finite trajectories in su

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