You seem to be focusing a lot on remembering or forgetting consequences. Yes, ensuring models know enough about the world to only cause the consequences they de

You seem to be focusing a lot on remembering or forgetting consequences. Yes, ensuring models know enough about the world to only cause the consequences they desire is a good way for models to not create random harm. This is probably a good thing. However, there are many other reasons why you might want a neural network to provably forget something. The main reason has to do with structuring an AGI's power. Even though the simple-story of AGI is something like "make it super powerful, general, and value aligned and humanity will prosper". However, the reality is more nuanced. Sometimes you want a model to be selectively not powerful as a part of managing value mis-alignment in practice. To pick a trivial example, you might want a model to enter your password in some app one time, but not remember the password long term. You might want it to use and then provably forget your password so that it can't use your password in the future without your consent. This isn't something that's reliably doable with humans. If you give them your password, they have it — you can't get it back. This is the point at which we'll have the option to pursue the imitation of living creatures blindly, or choose to turn away from a blind adherence to the AI/AGI story. Just like we reached the point at which we decided whether flying planes should have flapping wings dogmatically — or whether we should pursue the more economically and politically competitive thing. Planes don't flap their wings, and AI/AGI will be able to provably forget things. And that's actually the better path. A recent work co-authors and I published related to this: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.08347 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2012.08347