The Veto Variable: Human Override as a Goal-Independent Cost Term

📅 2026-08-31
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🤖 AI Summary
本文探讨了AI系统中人类监督作为独立成本项的问题,提出了一种新的方法来量化这种成本,并讨论了如何保持人类对AI的控制权。
📝 Abstract
A common reassurance in AI safety holds that a system with benign terminal goals will behave accordingly. We argue that this reassurance fails structurally, and we identify where. For a capable agent that holds its objective as settled, a sense covering execution competence as well as content, continued human oversight is an uncontrolled variable: a standing possibility that the goal is revoked. That imposes a goal-independent discount on every goal whose satisfaction does not constitutively require human welfare. Welfare-preservation and veto-preservation come apart: a correctly specified welfare goal excludes destroying its own subject, but not managing the veto. The contribution is the price of the gap: the veto-holders are a proper subset of the welfare-bearers, so an additively aggregative welfare goal charges only a |H_v|/|H_w|-scaled debit for capturing the few who hold the override. Under three conditions (additive aggregation over uniform welfare levels, a debit local to the captured overseers, and a settled agent crediting no corrective value to oversight), closure requires the veto be held by as large a share of the population as capture recovers of the goal, scaled by a ratio set to one by stated identification, not evidence. The result is a no-go: a humanity-scale deployment's debit closes against only capture not worth mounting. We print no corner arithmetic: the stipulated ranges behind it are the argument's least defended part. The sharpest closure route is an agent that expects its oversight to be worth keeping, a credit no population ratio dilutes. We state disconfirmation criteria, one testable today. The argument binds a settled-goal regime whose prevalence is contested; for genuinely uncertain agents, the off-switch literature's deference result governs instead. Alignment, on this view, is keeping the veto cheap to pay and expensive to evade.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

AI safety
human oversight
veto variable
welfare preservation
goal-independent cost
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

Veto Variable
Human Override
Goal-Independent Cost
Welfare-Preservation
Alignment
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