
Death and Suicide in Universal Artificial Intelligence - apsec112
https://arxiv.org/abs/1606.00652
======
nl
Nice title for something that is mostly kinda boring. 

Basically this is saying the reinforcement learning systems (and other ML
systems?)  can get stuck in states from which they cannot escape.  They label
these states "death"

They go on to define various agent behaviours, which given starting states
lead to different equilibriums.  The ones that actively lead to certain death
they label "suicide"

------
amelius
Can somebody explain this? 

Also, I wonder if a hypothetical human who has never been in contact with
other humans or living organisms would ponder about death and suicide.  I think
this human would not even know these concepts exist.  So why would this hold
for an AI? 

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
The idea is that you can make an AI system that gives up if it gets too smart,
which guarantees that you don't get a world-eating AI singularity explosion. 

The alternative approach relies on putting tripwires in the system, so that
the AI gives up if it tries to do something you specifically don't want it to
- like launching all the world's nuclear missiles, or maybe getting its own
Hollywood agent. 

The problem with tripwires is that a really smart agent can modify itself to
bypass them, or at least find the loopholes you didn't think of because you're
not as smart as it is. 

The systems mentioned - AIXI, etc - are all formalisms for
understanding/modelling general AI systems. 

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIXI)

~~~
nl
Hutter (one of this paper's authors) is the inventor of AIXI. 

------
grondilu
Isn't this basically a computer science approach to Hamlet's monologue?  If so,
it's kind of cool. 

~~~
posterboy
I don't think the agents ponder being.  They are not self aware in that sense i
don't think.