A putative new idea for AI control; index here.

This is the first of three articles about limitations and challenges in the concept of corrigibility (see articles 2 and 3).

The desiderata for corrigibility are:

A corrigible agent tolerates, and preferably assists, its operators in their attempts to alter or shut down the agent.
A corrigible agent does not attempt to manipulate or deceive its operators.
A corrigible agent has incentives to repair safety measures (such as shutdown buttons, tripwires, or containment tools) if they break, or at least notify its operators in the event of a breakage.
A corrigible agent preserves its corrigibility, even as it creates new sub-systems or sub-agents, even if it undergoes significant self-modification.

In this post, I'll be looking more at point 4. A summary of the result will be:

Unless giving the AI extra options can reduce expected utility, the AI must care about every possible utility at least a bit.

Some of the results are formal, but the boundaries of the model are very unclear, so the warning in this post should always be born in mind.

Note that the indifference agents fail to be fully corrigible (they don't create corrigible subagents) and they also don't care about the other possible utilities before being changed (as this is a point of indifference).

Agents versus non-agents

First I'll present a cleaner version of an old argument. Basically, it seems that defining what a sub-agent or sub-system is, is tricky or impossible.

Consider for instance a paperclip maximiser, that may get corriged into a staple maximiser at a later date. The AI has some income, and may buy a large proportion of shares in either General Paperclips (GP) or Staples United (SU). Assume the best way of promoting the use of one of the tools, it to take over the company that makes them.

There are two scenarios; in each scenario, the AI has one of two choices.

In scenario 1, the AI has choice A: it buys stocks in GP, but cannot make further trades (in particular, it can't sell its stocks and buy others). It also has choice B: it retains flexibility, and can sell its GP stocks at some later date to buy stocks in SU.

In scenario 2, the AI delegates its investment decisions to a subagent. Under choice A, the subagent is a pure paperclip maximiser. Under choice B, the subagent is corrigible, and can be changed into a staple maximiser.

Clearly 1A and

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Tripwire