Good and safe uses of AI Oracles

11/15/2017

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by   Stuart Armstrong, et al.

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An Oracle is a design for potentially high power artificial intelligences (AIs), where the AI is made safe by restricting it to only answer questions. Unfortunately most designs cause the Oracle to be motivated to manipulate humans with the contents of their answers, and Oracles of potentially high intelligence might be very successful at this. Solving the problem, without compromising the accuracy of the answer, is tricky. This paper reduces the issue to a cryptographic-style problem of Alice ensuring that her Oracle answers her questions while not providing key information to an eavesdropping Eve. Two Oracle designs solve this problem, one counterfactual (the Oracle answers as if it expected its answer to never be read) and one on-policy (limited by the quantity of information it can transmit).