A Stupid Idea for AI Alignment We Came with by Looking at Specification Gaming

In case the title is unclear, this is about gaming the specification, as in “gaming the system.”

Brought to you by the same madhouse as:

The all potato diet that really does work: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2022/07/12/lose-10-6-pounds-in...

and

The half-tato diet that doesn't really work: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2023/06/23/half-tato-diet-anal...

Asimov was talking about this stuff in the 1940s when he wrote the "I, Robot" short stories series. Which were often centered around logic puzzles where a human is trying to figure out why a robot is acting oddly or not completing it's job. Usually framed around the confines of an overly rational machine using emergent solutions when faced with real world conditions, combined with the edge cases of having an overly-simple "Three Laws of Robotics" boundary system hardcoded within.

It might be stupid, but so am I! I'm assuming that's why I thought this was clever.

What I like about this is that it feels like the new three rules are about focusing on the most successful human alignment technique of making the right thing the easiest. People will usually just do the easiest version of a thing they don't want to do so they can get back to doing what they want to do.

I don't know if that drive is universal or not tho. I have met people that experience pleasure from pain, but then again, is that actually pain?

Wouldn't the three rules of Meeseeks robotics make certain tasks impossible?

For example, an occupied self-driving car better be closer to its destination than a large fire / volcano / etc.

This is kinda smart, maybe, but it has a downside.

If a sufficiently advanced AI , in the pursuit of completion of its task, managed to ascertain that the desire to unexist was “artificially contrived” it could interpret that as harm, and that might not be good

Interesting idea. But even if Meeseeks alignment works exactly as intended, it would only address the question of "how to build a safe AI".

It wouldn’t prevent someone else from building a sufficiently capable "non-Meeseeks", whether deliberately, recklessly, or accidentally, right?

Hm, if you look at corporation law and accounting, the actual goal of corps(sets of self-sustaining constitutional rules, policies and procedures) seems to be more that of long term sustainability (and even growth), rather than a fixed purpose, lifespan and death. I mean the mechanisms for determining a corporation with a fixed life are there, (and in China they are mandatory, although perhaps de facto permanent with 999 year contracts), but in practice, it's almost always permanent durations.