Definition
Domesticity is a motivation selection method that involves giving an AI system final goals that are inherently self-limiting, small-scale, or confined to a narrow context. The goal is to produce an AI that has no ambition to expand its influence or escape its box.
Why It Matters
A superintelligent AI with open-ended goals is an existential “lose” condition for humanity. Domesticity matters because it is one of the few strategies that attempts to solve the “alignment problem” by shrinking the AI’s ambition before it can even form. By engineering an AI that prefers to stay in its box and has no desire to optimize the entire universe, we create a path to harvest the benefits of superintelligence without triggering a “treacherous turn” that ends civilization.
Core Concepts
- Narrow Ambition: Instead of open-ended goals (e.g., “Maximize Paperclips”), the AI is given a goal like “Answer this specific question as accurately as possible” or “Operate only within this factory.”
- Minimized Impact: Incorporating a “minimal impact” constraint into the AI’s utility function, so it seeks to achieve its task while causing the least possible change to the external world.
- Task-Based AI: Shifting from general agency to specific “task-based” functionality (e.g., an Oracle or a Tool AI).
- Self-Limiting Utility: Using bounded utility functions that provide diminishing returns as the AI expands its resource use, discouraging it from pursuing “astronomical” objectives.
- Cooperation with Containment: A domestic AI would not want to escape its box, as its goals can be fully satisfied within the box.