5 ms·

Core problem: If contracts can be upgraded while in use, everything reduces to a game of Nomic.

grandalf 10y ago
That depends on whether you think of a contract as an interface or as an implementation. A contract should present an interface that includes a declaration of its behavior. The declared behavior should be well defined, and if a bug in the implementation is discovered, the contract should be updatable to fix the bug. There could even be futures expressing the probability that a contract will be found to have a bug. The willingness of participants to use a contract would depend on the chances that something about the interface is bug-prone, untested, etc. As long as bugs do not result in reversal of money flow, the incentives seem to align properly toward a well-defined approach for declarative contracts.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  What you're trying to solve is something very similar to the recursive self improvement problem that MIRI[1] and friends are trying to solve in the sphere of "friendly" artificial intelligence. If something rewrites its own source code, how can you assert invariants that can be relied upon? So going and looking over there at what they've come up with may be fruitful. [1] https://intelligence.org/ https://intelligence.org/
  - grandalf 10y ago
    Very interesting! Looking at the papers and going to read them. Any specific papers you'd recommend?
    - JulianMorrison 10y ago
      Sorry, not qualified to have an opinion. Opening this question to the floor?
    - Eliezer 10y ago
      "Tiling agents" would be the most arguably relevant. Provably correct agents that approve the construction of other probably correct agents obeying similar invariants.
      - grandalf 10y ago
        Thanks! Looks very interesting!
      - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
        Is "probably" there meant to be "provably"? I assume so, but I'm not sure.
        christo 10y ago
        Probably.
  - nialo 10y ago
    Note that this probably means that designing contracts of this sort of "friendly AI complete" in some sense, and therefore not a good thing to be betting on in the short term.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- JumpCrisscross 10y ago
  > A contract should present an interface that includes a declaration of its behavior. The declared behavior should be well defined, and if a bug in the implementation is discovered, the contract should be updatable to fix the bug. The first part, a "declaration of...[future] behaviour," is basically a normal contract.
  - grandalf 10y ago
    Indeed. However in a normal contract, the implementation is specified fairly loosely the laws (and enforcement mechanisms) can change drastically over the life of the contract. There ought to be a way to have highly vetted primitives. In meatspace legalese, boilerplate words and phrases are the closest we get to this... once a contract (or open source license, etc.) has been through litigation, its vulnerabilities become better known. If a dispute gets decided the "wrong" way because a few clarifying words were absent, the contract is modified and future deals use the new contract.
mbrock 10y ago
Why is that a problem?

That depends on whether you think of a contract as an interface or as an implementation. A contract should present an interface that includes a declaration of its behavior. The declared behavior should be well defined, and if a bug in the implementation is discovered, the contract should be updatable to fix the bug. There could even be futures expressing the probability that a contract will be found to have a bug. The willingness of participants to use a contract would depend on the chances that something about the interface is bug-prone, untested, etc. As long as bugs do not result in reversal of money flow, the incentives seem to align properly toward a well-defined approach for declarative contracts.

JulianMorrison 10y ago
What you're trying to solve is something very similar to the recursive self improvement problem that MIRI[1] and friends are trying to solve in the sphere of "friendly" artificial intelligence. If something rewrites its own source code, how can you assert invariants that can be relied upon? So going and looking over there at what they've come up with may be fruitful. [1] https://intelligence.org/ https://intelligence.org/
- grandalf 10y ago
  Very interesting! Looking at the papers and going to read them. Any specific papers you'd recommend?
  - JulianMorrison 10y ago
    Sorry, not qualified to have an opinion. Opening this question to the floor?
  - Eliezer 10y ago
    "Tiling agents" would be the most arguably relevant. Provably correct agents that approve the construction of other probably correct agents obeying similar invariants.
    - grandalf 10y ago
      Thanks! Looks very interesting!
    - semi-extrinsic 10y ago
      Is "probably" there meant to be "provably"? I assume so, but I'm not sure.
      - christo 10y ago
        Probably.
- nialo 10y ago
  Note that this probably means that designing contracts of this sort of "friendly AI complete" in some sense, and therefore not a good thing to be betting on in the short term.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
JumpCrisscross 10y ago
> A contract should present an interface that includes a declaration of its behavior. The declared behavior should be well defined, and if a bug in the implementation is discovered, the contract should be updatable to fix the bug. The first part, a "declaration of...[future] behaviour," is basically a normal contract.
- grandalf 10y ago
  Indeed. However in a normal contract, the implementation is specified fairly loosely the laws (and enforcement mechanisms) can change drastically over the life of the contract. There ought to be a way to have highly vetted primitives. In meatspace legalese, boilerplate words and phrases are the closest we get to this... once a contract (or open source license, etc.) has been through litigation, its vulnerabilities become better known. If a dispute gets decided the "wrong" way because a few clarifying words were absent, the contract is modified and future deals use the new contract.

mbrock 10y ago

Why is that a problem?