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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35024 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 3, 2023

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Consistent Agents are Utilitarian: If you have an agent taking actions in the world and having preferences about the future states of the world, that agent must be utilitarian,

So is Eliezer calling me a utilitarian?

Your heading talks about consistent agents, but the premise that follows says nothing about consistency. [Sorry if you are just steelmanning someone else's argument, here "you" is that steelman, not necessarily /u/JhanicManifold].

  • If there is no such function V(s), then our agent is not consistent, and there are cycles we can find in its preference ordering, so it prefers state A to B, B to C, and C to A, which is a pretty stupid thing for an agent to do.

There's no reason even why a preference ordering has to exist. Almost any preference pair you can think about (e.g. choclate vs. strawberry icecream) is radically contextual.

Yes, that was a very incomplete argument for.AI.danger. Its not clear whether all, some or no AIs are consistent; its alao not clear why utilitarianism is dangerous.

There's no reason even why a preference ordering has to exist. Almost any preference pair you can think about (e.g. choclate vs. strawberry icecream) is radically contextual.

The utility function over states of the world takes into account context. If you have 2 ice cream flavors (C and S) and 2 contexts (context A and context B) it is possible to have

V(C, context A) > V(S, context A)

and

V(C, context B) < V(S, context B)

both be true at the same time without breaking coherence.

Functions have domains. The real world is not like that, context is only understood (if at all) after the fact. And machines (including brains) simply do what they do in response to the real world. It's only sometimes that we can tell stories about those actions in terms of preference orderings or utility functions.

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