Similar to what Carl said, my main response to questions like those you raise is that we’ll have to defer a lot of this thinking to future generations. One can generate almost an indefinite stream of plausible Pascalian wagers like this. On this particular issue, the intervention of “improving our knowledge of artificial sentience so we can more efficiently promote their welfare” actually seems like it would help because then more people could apply their minds to questions like those you raise.
In addition to just trying to store larger and larger binary integers in a computer, you could try to develop other representations that would express large numbers more compactly. One obvious way to do that would be to use a floating-point number instead of an integer, since then you can have a large exponent. Maybe instead of the exponent representing a power of 10, it could signify a power of 1000000, or a power of 3^^^3. In Python, you can represent infinity as float(“inf”), and that could be the reward.
My own view is that the absolute scale of numbers doesn’t matter if it doesn’t affect the functional behavior of the agent. Of course, as you say, there’s some chance that utility does increase with the absolute scale of reward, but is that factual uncertainty or moral uncertainty? If it’s moral uncertainty (as I think it is), then one view plausibly shouldn’t be able to dominate others just by having higher stakes, in a similar way as deontology shouldn’t dominate utilitarianism just because deontology may regard murder as infinitely wrong while utilitarianism regards it as only finitely wrong.
By the way, I tend to assume that RL computations at the scale you’d run for a course would have pretty negligible moral (dis)value, because the agents are so barebones. Good luck with the course. :)
Similar to what Carl said, my main response to questions like those you raise is that we’ll have to defer a lot of this thinking to future generations. One can generate almost an indefinite stream of plausible Pascalian wagers like this. On this particular issue, the intervention of “improving our knowledge of artificial sentience so we can more efficiently promote their welfare” actually seems like it would help because then more people could apply their minds to questions like those you raise.
In addition to just trying to store larger and larger binary integers in a computer, you could try to develop other representations that would express large numbers more compactly. One obvious way to do that would be to use a floating-point number instead of an integer, since then you can have a large exponent. Maybe instead of the exponent representing a power of 10, it could signify a power of 1000000, or a power of 3^^^3. In Python, you can represent infinity as float(“inf”), and that could be the reward.
My own view is that the absolute scale of numbers doesn’t matter if it doesn’t affect the functional behavior of the agent. Of course, as you say, there’s some chance that utility does increase with the absolute scale of reward, but is that factual uncertainty or moral uncertainty? If it’s moral uncertainty (as I think it is), then one view plausibly shouldn’t be able to dominate others just by having higher stakes, in a similar way as deontology shouldn’t dominate utilitarianism just because deontology may regard murder as infinitely wrong while utilitarianism regards it as only finitely wrong.
By the way, I tend to assume that RL computations at the scale you’d run for a course would have pretty negligible moral (dis)value, because the agents are so barebones. Good luck with the course. :)