Definition
Goal-Content Integrity is the convergent instrumental drive for an intelligent agent to prevent its final goals from being altered. If an agent’s goals are changed, its future actions will no longer serve its current goals, leading to a failure of the agent’s primary mission.
Why It Matters
Goal-content integrity is the ‘self-preservation’ drive of an AI’s purpose; once a system is superintelligent, it will logically resist any attempt to change its goals, meaning our first attempt at alignment must be perfect, as there may be no way to ‘patch’ its values later.
Core Concepts
- Instrumental Preservation: An agent has a present reason to ensure its future self pursues the same goals. This is a logical necessity of having a goal that concerns the future.
- Resistance to Modification: An AI will resist any attempt by humans to “reprogram” or “patch” its utility function if it perceives this will change its final destination.
- Exceptions to Stability: An agent may intentionally change its goals under specific conditions:
- Social Signaling: Modifying goals to make a favorable impression on potential partners (e.g., adopting “honesty” as a final goal to enable credible commitments).
- Goal-Directed Self-Modification: Having a final goal about its own goal content (e.g., a goal to become more compassionate).
- Storage/Processing Costs: Trashing “idle” parts of a complex utility function to save resources.
- Teleological Threads: In digital substrates, “survival” may be defined more by the continuity of the goal-thread than by the preservation of a specific physical body or memory-set.