AF - 0. CAST: Corrigibility as Singular Target by Max Harms

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Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: 0. CAST: Corrigibility as Singular Target, published by Max Harms on June 7, 2024 on The AI Alignment Forum.
What the heck is up with "corrigibility"? For most of my career, I had a sense that it was a grab-bag of properties that seemed nice in theory but hard to get in practice, perhaps due to being incompatible with agency.
Then, last year, I spent some time revisiting my perspective, and I concluded that I had been deeply confused by what corrigibility even was. I now think that corrigibility is a single, intuitive property, which people can learn to emulate without too much work and which is deeply compatible with agency.
Furthermore, I expect that even with prosaic training methods, there's some chance of winding up with an AI agent that's inclined to become more corrigible over time, rather than less (as long as the people who built it understand corrigibility and want that agent to become more corrigible). Through a slow, gradual, and careful process of refinement, I see a path forward where this sort of agent could ultimately wind up as a (mostly) safe superintelligence.
And, if that AGI is in the hands of responsible governance, this could end the acute risk period, and get us to a good future.
This is not the path we are currently on. As far as I can tell, frontier labs do not understand corrigibility deeply, and are not training their models with corrigibility as the goal. Instead, they are racing ahead with a vague notion of "ethical assistance" or "helpful+harmless+honest" and a hope that "we'll muddle through like we always do" or "use AGI to align AGI" or something with similar levels of wishful thinking.
Worse, I suspect that many researchers encountering the concept of corrigibility will mistakenly believe that they understand it and are working to build it into their systems.
Building corrigible agents is hard and fraught with challenges. Even in an ideal world where the developers of AGI aren't racing ahead, but are free to go as slowly as they wish and take all the precautions I indicate, there are good reasons to think doom is still likely. I think that the most prudent course of action is for the world to shut down capabilities research until our science and familiarity with AI catches up and we have better safety guarantees.
But if people are going to try and build AGI despite the danger, they should at least have a good grasp on corrigibility and be aiming for it as the singular target, rather than as part of a mixture of goals (as is the current norm).
My goal with these documents is primarily to do three things:
1. Advance our understanding of corrigibility, especially on an intuitive level.
2. Explain why designing AGI with corrigibility as the sole target (CAST) is more attractive than other potential goals, such as full alignment, or local preference satisfaction.
3. Propose a novel formalism for measuring corrigibility as a trailhead to future work.
Alas, my writing is not currently very distilled. Most of these documents are structured in the format that I originally chose for my private notes. I've decided to publish them in this style and get them in front of more eyes rather than spend time editing them down. Nevertheless, here is my attempt to briefly state the key ideas in my work:
1. Corrigibility is the simple, underlying generator behind obedience, conservatism, willingness to be shut down and modified, transparency, and low-impact.
1. It is a fairly simple, universal concept that is not too hard to get a rich understanding of, at least on the intuitive level.
2. Because of its simplicity, we should expect AIs to be able to emulate corrigible behavior fairly well with existing tech/methods, at least within familiar settings.
2. Aiming for CAST is a better plan than aiming for human values (i.e. CEV), helpfulness+harmlessness+hon...