Emergent Goals

Sub-category

Risk Domain

7AI System Safety, Failures & Limitations

7.6Multi-agent risks

Risks from multi-agent interactions, due to incentives (which can lead to conflict or collusion) and/or the structure of multi-agent systems, which can create cascading failures, selection pressures, new security vulnerabilities, and a lack of shared information and trust.

"Emergent Goals. Ascribing goals to a system is not always straightforward. For our present purposes, it will suffice to adopt a Dennetian perspective (Dennett, 1971), ascribing goals and intentions only when it is useful (i.e., predictive) to do so.51 While it might not be helpful to describe individual narrow AI tools as having goals, their combination may act as a (seemingly) goal-directed collective. For example, a group of moderation bots on a major social networking site could subtly but systematically manipulate the overall political perspectives of the user population, even though, individually, each agent is programmed to simply increase user engagement or filter out dis-preferred content."(p. 37)

Entity— Who or what caused the harm

Human

Due to a decision or action made by humans

AI system

Due to a decision or action made by an AI system

Other

Due to some other reason or is ambiguous

Intent— Whether the harm was intentional or accidental

Intentional

Due to an expected outcome from pursuing a goal

Unintentional

Due to an unexpected outcome from pursuing a goal