And is it a good model for value learning in AI?

(Read on Substack: https://recursingreflections.substack.com/p/shard-theory-is-it-true-for-humans)

TLDR

Shard theory proposes a view of value formation where experiences lead to the creation of context-based ‘shards’ that determine behaviour. Here, we go over psychological and neuroscientific views of learning, and find that while shard theory’s emphasis on context bears similarity to types of learning such as conditioning, it does not address top-down influences that may decrease the locality of value-learning in the brain.

What’s Shard Theory (and why do we care)?

In 2022, Quintin Pope and Alex Turner posted ‘The shard theory of human values’, where they described their view of how experiences shape the value we place on things. They give an example of a baby who enjoys drinking juice, and eventually learns that grabbing at the juice pouch, moving around to find the juice pouch, and modelling where the juice pouch might be, are all helpful steps in order to get to its reward.

‘Human values’, they say, ‘are not e.g. an incredibly complicated, genetically hard-coded set of drives, but rather sets of contextually activated heuristics…’ And since, like humans, AI is often trained with reinforcement learning, the same might apply to AI.

The original post is long (over 7,000 words) and dense, but Lawrence Chan helpfully posted a condensation of the topic in ‘Shard Theory in Nine Theses: a Distillation and Critical Appraisal’. In it, he presents nine (as might be expected) main points of shard theory, ending with the last thesis: ‘shard theory as a model of human values’. ‘I’m personally not super well versed in neuroscience or psychology’, he says, ‘so I can’t personally attest to [its] solidity…I’d be interested in hearing from experts in these fields on this topic.’ And that’s exactly what we’re here to do.

A Crash Course on Human Learning

Types of learning

What is learning? A baby comes into the world and is inundated with sensory information of all kinds. From then on, it must process this information, take whatever’s useful, and store it somehow for future use.

There’s various places in the brain where this information is stored, and for various purposes. Looking at these various types of storage, or memory, can help us understand what’s going on:

3 types of memory

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