Misgeneralization as a misnomer
Here’s two different ways an AI can turn out unfriendly:
- You somehow build an AI that cares about “making people happy”. In training, it tells people jokes and buys people flowers and offers people an ear when they need one. In deployment (and once it’s more capable), it forcibly puts each human in a separate individual heavily-defended cell, and pumps them full of opiates.
- You build an AI that’s good at making people happy. In training, it tells people jokes and buys people flowers and offers people an ear when they need one. In deployment (and once it’s more capable), it turns out that whatever was causing that “happiness”-promoting behavior was a balance of a variety of other goals (such as basic desires for energy and memory), and it spends most of the universe on some combination of that other stuff that doesn’t involve much happiness.
(To state the obvious: please don’t try to get your AIs to pursue “happiness”; you want something more like CEV in the long run, and in the short run I strongly recommend aiming lower, at a pivotal act .)
In both cases, the AI behaves (during training) in a way that looks a lot like trying to make people happy. Then the AI described in (1) is unfriendly because it was optimizing the wrong concept of “happiness”, one that lined up with yours when the AI was weak, but that diverges in various edge-cases that matter when the AI is strong. By contrast, the AI described in (2) was never even really trying to pursue happiness; it had a mixture of goals that merely correlated with the training objective, and that balanced out right around where you wanted them to balance out in training, but deployment (and the corresponding capabilities-increases) threw the balance off.
Note that this list of “ways things can go wrong when the AI looked like it was optimizing happiness during training” is not exhaustive! (For instance, consider an AI that cares about something else entirely, and knows you’ll shut it down if it doesn’t look like it’s optimizing for happiness. Or an AI whose goals change heavily as it reflects and self-modifies.)