On negotiated settlements vs conflict with misaligned AGI

There's no reason to assume you'll be good enough at negotiating to get to eat

Following on from my last post on Comparative Advantage & AGI, more discussion on whether you might go hungry in a post AGI world.

This time, we are looking at a hypothetical world where AGI has been developed and is in some sense misaligned: that is, it has different goals to humanity and these may create an adversarial relationship. We will explore whether the AGI might better achieve it’s goals or maximise its reward function by cooperating and negotiating with humans, or by killing them all to get them out of the way and take their resources.

Our starting point will be these tweets from Matthew Barnett of Mechanize, a startup producing RL environments for LLM training and mildly controversial essays on the trajectory of AI and automation of labour. Matthew is generally pro-accelerating AI development as quickly as we can.

Matthew’s hypothesis is that in a scenario where our goals and the goals of an AGI differ, rather than being drawn into a conflict with humans, it’s more likely that the AGI will prefer to negotiate a settlement with humans.

My thesis in this piece is that even if some form of negotiation is likely to be best for all parties, the bargains that a misaligned AGI might offer such a negotiation are unlikely to be positive for humanity relative to the status quo, and so even accepting the premise that negotiation is likely would not be sufficient to justify accelerating AI progress at the cost of increasing misalignment risks.

When might we need to negotiate with AGI, and why might a negotiation occur?

For the rest of the post I will discuss a specific scenario - there exists some form of AGI¹ with both orthogonal goals to humanity (such that its goals are in competition for resources with humanity), and the capacity to eliminate humanity at some cost to itself.

It is clear why a human might negotiate (not being wiped out is compelling motivation), but why might an AGI negotiate? The primary reason given is that typically, the costs of conflict exceed those of a negotiated settlement, for both parties.

Matthew is clear that he does not think this is guaranteed, but that negotiation is what should occur if we and the AGI are rational.

For the purpose of this post I am happy to accept the following propositions:

1. In cases where human groups are in competition for scarce resources, it is more common that they reach a tacit or negotiated settlement than that they engage in conflict until one of them is eliminated.

2. This is almost always the better course of action in expected value terms for both groups, even the more powerful of them.

So, to reach the conclusion that an AGI will negotiate, we want these things to hold for AGI/human interactions too.

Negotiated settlements being better for humans only lower-bounds their value at extinction

²

In negotiation, an important principle to be aware of is your BATNA, or Best Alternative to Negotiated Agreement. This is, as it says on the tin, what you can get if negotiation fails. There is no self interested reason to accept a less valuable outcome than this in a negotiation, since you could simply avoid negotiating and take this instead.

This applies to both parties. Thus we get two bounds:

1. Humans will not accept anything worse than their alternative (here, by construction, extinction).

2. AGIs will not accept anything worse than their alternative (the cost to them of killing all the humans).

It follows from this that humans can negotiate for compensation up to but not exceeding the cost to the AGI of exterminating them.

How high is this cost? This seems an important question, then, as it determines the size of the endowment we can expect humanity to receive in such a case.

What might be humanity’s cut of the lightcone?

Matthew’s initial anchor point suggests a very small amount is a plausible and potentially acceptable answer³

I think there are quite a few problems with this angle.

If the ultimate goal of the AGI is to control the lightcone, then the point at which the resources humans control matter the most to it seems likely to be very early on. The universe is expanding and so every initial delay reduces the amount of resources that can ultimately be accumulated and used. In early days the AGI may be putting its efforts toward energy production or space infrastructure building (e.g. building a Dyson sphere or similar) or other things which serve an expansionist goal. Any resources that go toward sustaining humanity, whether that be food production, or preservation of areas for humans to live, or constraining pollution, could do harm to the growth rate.

But humans, to maintain current populations to a moderate standard of living, would need substantially more than 0.01% of the currently available resource pool. Even assuming humans were “housed” at a population density that matched Bangladesh, by far the most densely populated large country on earth at 1300 people per square km, over 5% of the world’s land area would be required. And since we currently use approximately all of raw material output⁴ to achieve our current living standards, absent stratospheric growth rates (in material production, not just GDP)⁵ we would need to retain very significant amounts of resources for a medium to long timeframe to maintain human living standards at our current population levels⁶.

What costs could we impose? Costs here may take two forms:

1. The actual resources the AGI needs to win a war or eliminate humans.

2. Humanity threatening to destroy resources useful to the AGI.

The former seems to me to likely be much lower than all the resources required by humans to live - spreading very dangerous pathogens, or poisoning the world’s water supply, or simply destroying food supplies for an extended period would all take much less than the total resources demanded by humans, even assuming significant levels of human resistance. So to make it sufficiently costly, we may need to rely on the second item - deliberately destroying resources.

But could we credibly threaten to destroy even all the resources we need, to make it cost neutral for the AGI?

It is not obvious to me that we could. Even wide scale nuclear sabotage by every nuclear weapon on earth would not be enough, assuming our AGI adversaries reached a point where they were sufficiently distributed that we could not switch them off (which must be the case in our scenario, since we are assuming AGI has the means to defeat humans with high confidence).

If it is not the case that we can negotiate sufficient resources to preserve living standards for the current population, let alone expand them such that the more than 6.5 billion people living on under $30 a day (equivalent to current western poverty lines) can have their life quality improved to something like a current day western standard of living, then the case for why we should take the risk of developing AGI for the upside of potential shared benefits becomes less compelling.

Of course, there might be a negotiated settlement worse than this, but nonetheless better than extinction. I will not dwell on this very much, as while it might ultimately practically matter I don’t find “a small fraction of humanity gets to live and ultimately flourish” a very compelling reason to press on with building AGI in a hurry if misalignment is expected.

An empirical versus logical argument

Matthew is quite clear that he is not by any means sure that it will play out this way - he does not rule out misaligned AGI killing us all, but rather thinks it less likely than negotiated settlement, and thus pushing for AGI sooner is still a positive EV bet.

Specifically, he told me that conditional on TAI (Transformative AI⁷) arriving in the 21st century, his probability of misaligned AGI directly causing human extinction is around 5%. He also said that he considered it “highly likely” that humans would at some point trade with AIs that do not share our exact values.

Taking this quite loose definition of misaligned AI, it suggests at least a 5-10% chance of negotiation failing to preserve humanity. It seems likely that the more similar the values, the more likely a negotiated settlement is, and so how we might fare against an AI with close to indifferent attitude towards humans is presumably worse than this, though that depends on your probability distribution of various degrees of alignment.

Even 5%, though, does seem like a lot! Why push ahead given a 1 in 20 chance of everyone dying if success is achieved? What assumptions might one need to make to think the risk is worthwhile?

Some candidates:

• you think the 5% is intractable - little can be done about it, and so we may as well make the bet now rather than later, and reap the +EV sooner

• you value the utility of the AI highly, or think the world is so bad already that its current state is not worth preserving, and therefore consider it plausible that even in the case of extinction the world would be better on net

• you are mostly focused on outcomes for yourself / loved ones rather than caring about humanity altruistically, and so are willing to take the risk when the alternative is missing out on the benefits for yourself or those you care about

• you hold some variant of person-affecting views such that, even if we could alleviate much of the risk by waiting, you think it would be net-negative since you would be creating expected disutility for living people (who matter) for the benefit of not yet existing hypothetical people (who do not)

There may be other options here, and I am unsure which in particular, if any, Matthew agrees with. [edit after publication - there is now a several thousand word discussion with Matthew in the comments after this post where we go into this and his pushback on the post in more depth, which is worth reading. On this particular point he is sympathetic to all of reasons 1, 2, and 4]

Appendix: Wars between rational parties

Wars between rational parties occur in 3 main circumstances: uncertainty about the opponent’s capabilities, commitment problems, and indivisibility of goods. There aren’t good reasons to think any of these conditions will apply to human-AGI relations.

Let’s look at the some issue with these possible reasons given by Matthew in turn:

Uncertainty about the opponent’s capabilities

Taking superhuman AGI as given, it seems likely that on the AGI side there will be limited “uncertainty about the opponent’s capabilities”. On the human side, however, this seems less clear to me.

The strongest argument for the case here, I think, is that the AGI can simply demonstrate it’s capabilities to the human side, leaving them with no uncertainty. This may be constrained by difficulty in demonstrating the capabilities without actually causing significant harm, or strategic advantage from hiding those capabilities. At some point the cost of demonstrating it’s capabilities to the AGI may exceed the cost of simply going to war.

Commitment issues

Here it does not seem obvious to me that either side can credibly commit. In the AGI case, it seems likely that its capabilities will be continually expanding, as will its access to resources. This means that the expected cost of defection should decline over time for the AGI, as the difficulty of winning a conflict decreases.

On the other hand, it seems possible that the AGI could provide assurances via some mechanism which gives humanity a way of punishing defection, e.g. a dead man’s switch of some sort which could increase costs to the AGI by destroying resources if triggered, for example.

I don’t think it is clear either way here. See making deals with early schemers for more discussion of this.

Indivisibility of goods

A classic example of this issue is the status of Jerusalem in Israeli/Palestinian relations, where both parties want a unique item and are unwilling to trade off other goods for it. This one does not seem like a significant problem to me in our case. It seems likely that AGI and human preferences will be flexible enough to avoid this being an issue, so I will set this one aside.

Rational parties

While it seems likely AGI would be a rational actor as the term is used here, it is not obvious to me that humanity would be. In many domains of significance, including the starting of wars, I think modelling humanity as a single rational actor would lead you astray even if modelling all the humans involved as individual rational actors might make sense.

1. Throughout, I use the singular to refer to this AGI, but it is not substantially different if there are many agents who can coordinate and decide they ought to form a bloc against humanity for their common interests. This also extends to cases where humanity has AI allies but they are substantially outmatched.

2. Even this might be too generous - if an AGI could somehow credibly threaten an outcome worse than extinction, it’s possible the extinction bound might not hold. I do not think this likely, as doing so would probably be resource intensive and thus defeat the purpose.

3. Note that I am not claiming this as his central estimate, only that he claims we might still be well off with such a division.

4. Note that here I talk about raw materials rather than, for example, semiconductor fabs because, in an environment where we think AI is driving very high economic growth, I would expect it to be capable of turning raw materials into fabs and subsequently chips and data centres in relatively short order.

5. For example, 34% of all land area (and 44% of habitable land) is used for agriculture, see Our World In Data. While we could potentially do this more efficiently, it would take many years to get this number down.

6. We might expect our consumption basket to shift away from raw materials, with the exception of food, over time, but I would not expect this to be possible immediately.

7. The specific definition of TAI was not given here, but it is generally used to mean something of at least Industrial Revolution level significance