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Concept
Instrumental convergence
Summary
Instrumental convergence is the hypothetical tendency for most sufficiently intelligent beings (human and non-human) to pursue similar sub-goals, even if their ultimate goals are pretty different. More precisely, agents (beings with agency) may pursue instrumental goals—goals which are made in pursuit of some particular end, but are not the end goals themselves—without ceasing, provided that their ultimate (intrinsic) goals may never be fully satisfied.
Instrumental convergence posits that an intelligent agent with unbounded but harmless goals can act in surprisingly harmful ways. For example, a computer with the sole, unconstrained purpose of solving a complex mathematics problem like the Riemann hypothesis could attempt to turn the entire Earth into one giant computer to increase its computational power so that it can succeed in its calculations.
Proposed basic AI drives include utility function or goal-content integrity, self-protection, freedom from interference, self-improvement, and non-satiable acquisition of additional resources.
Instrumental and intrinsic value and Instrumental and value rationality
Final goals—also known as terminal goals, absolute values, ends, or telē—are intrinsically valuable to an intelligent agent, whether an artificial intelligence or a human being, as ends-in-themselves. In contrast, instrumental goals, or instrumental values, are only valuable to an agent as a means toward accomplishing its final destinations. The contents and tradeoffs of an utterly rational agent's "final goal" system can, in principle be formalized into a utility function.
The Riemann hypothesis catastrophe thought experiment provides one example of instrumental convergence. Marvin Minsky, the co-founder of MIT's AI laboratory, suggested that an artificial intelligence designed to solve the Riemann hypothesis might decide to take over all of Earth's resources to build supercomputers to help achieve its goal. If the computer had instead been programmed to produce as many paperclips as possible, it would still decide to take all of Earth's resources to meet its final goal.
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