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Subagents

AGI Safety Literature Review

Everitt. Lea & Hutter (2018)

Category
Risk Domain

AI systems that develop, access, or are provided with capabilities that increase their potential to cause mass harm through deception, weapons development and acquisition, persuasion and manipulation, political strategy, cyber-offense, AI development, situational awareness, and self-proliferation. These capabilities may cause mass harm due to malicious human actors, misaligned AI systems, or failure in the AI system.

"An AGI may decide to create subagents to help it with its task (Orseau, 2014a,b; Soares, Fallenstein, et al., 2015). These agents may for example be copies of the original agent’s source code running on additional machines. Subagents constitute a safety concern, because even if the original agent is successfully shut down, these subagents may not get the message. If the subagents in turn create subsubagents, they may spread like a viral disease."(p. 9)

Other risks from Everitt. Lea & Hutter (2018) (8)