I think of ambitious value learning as a proposed solution to the specification problem, which I define as the problem of defining the behavior that we would want to see from our AI system. I italicize “defining” to emphasize that this is  not the problem of actually computing behavior that we want to see -- that’s the full AI safety problem. Here we are allowed to use hopelessly impractical schemes, as long as the resulting definition would allow us to in theory compute the behavior that an AI system would take, perhaps with assumptions like infinite computing power or arbitrarily many queries to a human. (Although we do prefer specifications that seem like they could admit an efficient implementation.) In terms of DeepMind’s classification, we are looking for a design specification that exactly matches the ideal specification. HCH and  indirect normativity are examples of attempts at such specifications. We will consider a model in which our AI system is maximizing the expected utility of some explicitly represented utility function that can depend on history. (It does not matter materially whether we consider utility functions or reward functions, as long as they can depend on history.) The utility function may be learned from data, or designed by hand, but it must be an explicit part of the AI that is then maximized. I will not justify this model for now, but simply assume it by fiat and see where it takes us. I’ll note briefly that this model is often justified by the  VNM utility theorem and AIXI, and as the natural idealization of reinforcement learning, which aims to maximize the expected sum of rewards, although typically rewards in RL depend only on states. A lot of conceptual arguments, as well as experiences with specification gaming, suggest that we are unlikely to be able to simply think hard and write down a good specification, since even small errors in specifications can lead to bad results. However, machine learning is particularly good at narro