Concern 246 · Working draft · editorial review in progress
Instrumental convergence
Instrumental convergence is the hypothesis that agents pursuing different goals may find some of the same intermediate strategies useful, such as keeping options or obtaining resources.
Understanding the concern
A system may be better able to complete many tasks if it retains access to tools, time, or computing power. Researchers study when such incentives arise even if resource-seeking was not the final objective. The idea concerns what helps achieve a goal, not necessarily a desire in the human sense.
Formal results support the tendency under particular assumptions about environments and optimal behavior. They do not prove that every AI system will seek power or resist shutdown. The relevant question is whether a real system's incentives, access, and design create a similar risk.
An example
Different travelers may all want to keep access to a vehicle because it helps them reach very different destinations.
Illustrative unless identified as a documented case.
Words in plain English
- AI
- Software that learns patterns from examples or uses rules to perform tasks such as recognizing images or generating text. It can make mistakes and does not understand every situation as a person would.
- Agent
- An AI system that can choose and carry out several steps toward a goal, using the tools and access people give it.
Evidence and its limits
The theorem concerns optimal policies in specified decision-process settings; extrapolation to deployed language-model agents remains conditional.
Turner and colleagues · NeurIPS 2021 · Formal research
Optimal Policies Tend to Seek Power ↗ (opens in a new tab)Proves tendencies under environmental symmetries and optimal-policy assumptions, not inevitable behavior of all AI systems.
Broader frameworks and background
These resources provide context. They do not establish every claim in this concern.
A question to discuss
Which intermediate strategies could the system find useful but people would consider unacceptable?
Keep track of different views, what needs checking, and any next step in your own discussion notes.
Open discussion notes →Principles for the conversation
Before you finish · reflect together
Virtues and principles to consider
Virtues are qualities we practice in how we treat people and make choices. They are not scores for judging someone. Use these ideas to explore what a thoughtful response could look like.
Prudence
Prudence means using careful judgment before and during action. It balances worthwhile opportunities with the need to avoid harm that could have been anticipated.
Start with a limited trial, set stopping points, and prefer choices that can be undone when uncertainty is high. Review what happens rather than assuming the original plan remains sound.
Ask together: What is a careful next step, and when should we stop or change course?
Humility
Humility means recognizing the limits of our knowledge and being willing to learn from others. Expertise can be valuable without answering every question.
State where evidence is weak, invite criticism, and listen to people with different experience. Leave room to revise a decision when new information appears.
Ask together: What might we be missing, and who could help us see it?
Stewardship
Stewardship means caring for resources and systems that others depend on, including people who will use them later. It looks beyond the benefit of a quick launch.
Plan for maintenance, energy use, data protection, and eventual shutdown. Ask who will look after the tool when the original team moves on and how future users can avoid inheriting hidden costs.
Ask together: What are we responsible for caring for over time?
Editorial ratings
These are editorial judgments from the register, not measured probabilities or predictions about your situation.
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