utility function

“My doctoral advisor gave me a great piece of advice: Know your own utility function,” Lamberton says, referencing an economic term for the satisfaction you gain from a certain product.

Though AI has the ability to pursue and improve a designated “utility function”, something that it can be programmed to pursue, it is incapable of pursuing a “values function” and therefore understanding human values.

“Regret theory models choice under uncertainty taking into account the effect of anticipated regret. … It incorporates a regret term in the utility function which depends negatively on the realized outcome and positively on the best alternative outcome given the uncertainty resolution.”

The court said streetlights were a general-government rather than a utility function and said City Light was imposing an illegal and unconstitutional tax on ratepayers.

If the utility function of artificial intelligence is to maximise happiness of humans, a super-intelligent AI might decide that the best way to do that is to capture all humans and inject their brains with dopamine and serotonin.