To be clear, I do have a few ideas, but they're hypotheses I privileged, so I don't want to poison your thinking by mentioning them.
Maybe in three days (or whenever I finish the mega essay), I'll lay them out later and explore why I'm dissatisfied with them.
Sorry for the length of this "question". The post in which I cover the preliminary context hasn't been published yet (4,000+ words and I'm < 40% through my outline).
I have done some thinking of how one might quantify the capabilities of an AI system to influence the "real world" environment.
I have identified three broad interfaces for executing capabilities:
The AI could influence the world by convincing humans to do things that it wants.
Some relevant skills:
The idea here is influence the real world via influencing individual humans or groups of humans
To a first approximation, a function to quantify human capabilities might be a positive (aggregate) function of something like: “the likelihood that the AI could convince a(n arbitrary) human to perform a(n arbitrary) act” (let's call this the likelihood of successful persuasion [LSP]). The function may apply suitable modifications to LSP such as:
The human interface is just the AI influencing the world via influencing humans. A naive way to quantify the AI's ability to influence humans is something like an aggregate of LSP. Upon thinking on it for a few seconds, you'd like to modify the LSP in some ways.
This is vague, because I am not trying to design a concrete measure of "ability to influence humans", at this stage of my thinking, I'm fine with a high level abstraction of what such a measure might look like.
The AI could influence the world via the levers of human civilisation. A non-exhaustive list of relevant human infrastructure follows:
An example of influencing the world via human infrastructure is hacking into a web server. I'm not going to attempt to list the relevant classes of skills for interacting with human infrastructure because they are far too many.
Some ways of interfacing with human infrastructure
To a first approximation, you want something like "economic power". One might try to capture related concepts like social power, but I think "economic power" will capture it adequately.
Some ways to operationalise economic power:
At the level of abstraction at which I'm thinking of things, I find his vague notion satisfactory.
My intuition for quantifying "human infrastructure interfacing capabilities" in economic terms is something like:
AKA the "bare interface".
The AI can also attempt to manipulate its environment directly without using the humans or human infrastructure interfaces. Any way of interacting with the real world that doesn't use the "human"/"human infrastructure" proxies — interfacing with bare reality itself — are interacting via the "physics" interface.
One way of an AI system interacting with a human through the physics interface is shooting them down with a lethal autonomous weapon.
The other natural sciences (chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology etc.) apply here (but they seem to be emergent physics/physics at higher levels of abstraction, so I still think of it as the "physics interface" [but I'm willing to change/drop the name if people are sufficiently opposed to it]).
Some relevant skills to influence physics include:
At a very high level of abstraction (consider the methods I proposed for the other interfaces) how would you quantify the ability of an AI System to influence bare reality?
A good abstraction for quantifying the physics interfacing capabilities of an AI system should have the following properties:
Money is very good a measure for quantifying capability deployed via the human infrastructure interface because it satisfies the above criteria (when reinterpreted to fit human infrastructure).
So for clues on where to look, what fits the analogy: "money but for physics"? What's the currency with which arbitrary physical capability can be purchased?