[ot][crazy] mind control and matter mutation without harm: yet another attempt to solve a current problem

[Undescribed Horrific Abuse, One Victim & Survivor of Many]

Say you want to make somebody in a neighboring country smile, but:
- you can’t travel or send a message to their country
- some people do interact with their country, but you’re not sure who
- you have a map of everyone in their country you bought
- you have a powerful AI

A naive approach might be to train your AI to make people smile at a
distance by influencing the people in between.

Unfortunately, when only the smiling of the distant person is in the
AI’s reward function, it may learn to enslave the people in between so
as to:
- report on the person’s smiling
- form groups discussing how much they smile and what influences it
- stimulate them smiling in a way totally unknown to you, excessively
and perversely, and
- be left confused and helpless, wondering where their god went, when
you pull the AI out.

I was briefly thinking on this challenge because it is similar to the
challenge of controlling your body when you have a severe dissociative
palsy from items similar to the ones listed above. [It also overlaps
with other extreme puzzles like teleportation]

Basically, the challenge of rapidly influencing something at a
distance _without_ harming anything between you and it simplifies to
the challenge of even more rapidly influencing things nearby in a
harmless way, such that they participate in the more distant influence
in a way that is to their forthright benefit.

Ideally, of course, we communicate instead of influence, and we hope
that influence without harm simplifies to communication and beg people
to make requests of us rather than throw us to the runaway paperclip
factories.

Anyway, simple ideas start out with rapidly comprehending communities
and individuals and preparing for them “information and experience
packages” that aid them, help them understand what is going on, and
make it forthrightly clear that is to the benefit of their values,
selves, and communities to help the more distant relation happen.

In a situation like this, if a model of somebody’s values is wrong,
it’s important to pull out quickly and make things right, because the
impact is so large.

Given the goal is rapid distant effect, it’s hard to quickly figure
out how to hold the meaning and importance of two-way communication,
and I suspect theories similar to faster-than-light-discovery and
attempts at time travel could be a little relevant — but I’m thinking
providing living beings or robots that can learn independently how to
resolve things in forthright caring, respectful, and contributive ways
could be helpful if back-and-forth communication remains a challenge.