Towards shutdownable agents via stochastic choice
Elliott Thornley (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford), Alexander Roman (New College of Florida), Christos Ziakas (Independent), Leyton Ho (Brown University) and Louis Thomson (University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 16-2024
Some worry that advanced artificial agents may resist being shut down. The Incomplete Preferences Proposal (IPP) is an idea for ensuring that doesn’t happen. A key part of the IPP is using a novel ‘Discounted REward for Same-Length Trajectories (DREST)’ reward function to train agents to (1) pursue goals effectively conditional on each trajectory-length (be ‘USEFUL’), and (2) choose stochastically between different trajectory-lengths (be ‘NEUTRAL’ about trajectory-lengths). In this paper, we propose evaluation metrics for USEFULNESS and NEUTRALITY. We use a DREST reward function to train simple agents to navigate gridworlds, and we find that these agents learn to be USEFUL and NEUTRAL. Our results thus suggest that DREST reward functions could also train advanced agents to be USEFUL and NEUTRAL, and thereby make these advanced agents useful and shutdownable.
Other working papers
Time discounting, consistency and special obligations: a defence of Robust Temporalism – Harry R. Lloyd (Yale University)
This paper defends the claim that mere temporal proximity always and without exception strengthens certain moral duties, including the duty to save – call this view Robust Temporalism. Although almost all other moral philosophers dismiss Robust Temporalism out of hand, I argue that it is prima facie intuitively plausible, and that it is analogous to a view about special obligations that many philosophers already accept…
Longtermist institutional reform – Tyler M. John (Rutgers University) and William MacAskill (Global Priorities Institute, Oxford University)
There is a vast number of people who will live in the centuries and millennia to come. Even if homo sapiens survives merely as long as a typical species, we have hundreds of thousands of years ahead of us. And our future potential could be much greater than that again: it will be hundreds of millions of years until the Earth is sterilized by the expansion of the Sun, and many trillions of years before the last stars die out. …
Is Existential Risk Mitigation Uniquely Cost-Effective? Not in Standard Population Models – Gustav Alexandrie (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford) and Maya Eden (Brandeis University)
What socially beneficial causes should philanthropists prioritize if they give equal ethical weight to the welfare of current and future generations? Many have argued that, because human extinction would result in a permanent loss of all future generations, extinction risk mitigation should be the top priority given this impartial stance. Using standard models of population dynamics, we challenge this conclusion. We first introduce a theoretical framework for quantifying undiscounted cost-effectiveness over…