Related papers: Will artificial agents pursue power by default?
Intention is an important and challenging concept in AI. It is important because it underlies many other concepts we care about, such as agency, manipulation, legal responsibility, and blame. However, ascribing intent to AI systems is…
This report examines what I see as the core argument for concern about existential risk from misaligned artificial intelligence. I proceed in two stages. First, I lay out a backdrop picture that informs such concern. On this picture,…
If capable AI agents are generally incentivized to seek power in service of the objectives we specify for them, then these systems will pose enormous risks, in addition to enormous benefits. In fully observable environments, most reward…
Recent progress in artificial intelligence (AI) has drawn attention to the technology's transformative potential, including what some see as its prospects for causing large-scale harm. We review two influential arguments purporting to show…
Power is a key concept in AI safety: power-seeking as an instrumental goal, sudden or gradual disempowerment of humans, power balance in human-AI interaction and international AI governance. At the same time, power as the ability to pursue…
Power-seeking behavior is a key source of risk from advanced AI, but our theoretical understanding of this phenomenon is relatively limited. Building on existing theoretical results demonstrating power-seeking incentives for most reward…
This position paper argues that AI agents should be regulated by the extent to which they operate autonomously. AI agents with long-term planning and strategic capabilities can pose significant risks of human extinction and irreversible…
Instrumental goals such as resource acquisition, power-seeking, and self-preservation are key to contemporary AI alignment research, yet the phenomenon's ontology remains under-theorised. This article develops an ontological account of…
Potential advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) could have profound implications for how countries research and develop weapons systems, and how militaries deploy those systems on the battlefield. The idea of AI-enabled military…
The AI alignment problem, which focusses on ensuring that artificial intelligence (AI), including AGI and ASI, systems act according to human values, presents profound challenges. With the progression from narrow AI to Artificial General…
A longstanding goal of artificial intelligence is to create artificial agents capable of learning to perform tasks that require sequential decision making. Importantly, while it is the artificial agent that learns and acts, it is still up…
Artificial intelligence (AI) was initially developed as an implicit moral agent to solve simple and clearly defined tasks where all options are predictable. However, it is now part of our daily life powering cell phones, cameras, watches,…
As AI becomes more "agentic," it faces technical and socio-legal issues it must address if it is to fulfill its promise of increased economic productivity and efficiency. This paper uses technical and legal perspectives to explain how…
The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) systems suggests that artificial general intelligence (AGI) systems may soon arrive. Many researchers are concerned that AIs and AGIs will harm humans via intentional misuse (AI-misuse)…
Can AI agents predict whether they will succeed at a task? We study agentic uncertainty by eliciting success probability estimates before, during, and after task execution. All results exhibit agentic overconfidence: some agents that…
It is hypothesized by some thinkers that benign looking AI objectives may result in powerful AI drives that may pose an existential risk to human society. We analyze this scenario and find the underlying assumptions to be unlikely. We…
The rapid assimilation of Artificial Intelligence technologies into various facets of society has created a significant educational imperative that current frameworks are failing to effectively address. We are witnessing the rise of a…
This report examines whether advanced AIs that perform well in training will be doing so in order to gain power later -- a behavior I call "scheming" (also sometimes called "deceptive alignment"). I conclude that scheming is a disturbingly…
An intelligent agent may in general pursue multiple procedural goals simultaneously, which may lead to arise some conflicts (incompatibilities) among them. In this paper, we focus on the incompatibilities that emerge due to resources…
This report serves as an accessible guide to the emerging field of AI agent governance. Agents - AI systems that can autonomously achieve goals in the world, with little to no explicit human instruction about how to do so - are a major…