The ability to make credible commitments is a key factor in many bargaining situations ranging from trade to international conflict. This post builds a taxonomy of the commitment mechanisms that transformative AI (TAI) systems could use in future multipolar scenarios, describes various issues they have in practice, and draws some tentative conclusions about the landscape of commitments we might expect in the future.

Introduction

A better understanding of the commitments that future AI systems could make is helpful for predicting and influencing the dynamics of multipolar scenarios. The option to credibly bind oneself to certain actions or strategies fundamentally changes the game theory behind bargaining, cooperation, and conflict. Credible commitments and general transparency can work to stabilize positive-sum agreements, and to increase the efficiency of threats (Schelling 1960), both of which could be relevant to how well TAI trajectories will reflect our values.

Because human goals can be contradictory, and even broadly aligned AI systems could come to prioritize different outcomes depending on their domains and histories, these systems could end up in competitive situations and bargaining failures where a lot of value is lost. Similarly, if some systems in a multipolar scenario are well aligned and others less so, some worst cases might be avoidable if stable peaceful agreements can be reached. As an example of the practical significance of commitment ability in stabilizing peaceful strategies, standard theories in international relations hold that conflicts between nations are difficult to avoid indefinitely primarily because there are no reliable commitment mechanisms for peaceful agreements (e.g. Powell 2004, Lake 1999, Rosato 2015), even when nations would overall prefer them.

In addition to the direct costs of conflict, the lack of enforceable commitments leads to continuous resource loss from arms races, monitoring, and other preparations for possible hostility. It can also simply prevent gains from trade that binding prosocial contracts and high trust could unlock. A strategic landscape that resembles current international relations in these respects seems possible in a fully multipolar scenario, where no AI system has yet gained a decisive advantage over the others, and no external rule of law can be strongly enforced over all the systems. If AI s...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments