Undesirable Dispositions from Competition

"Undesirable Dispositions from Competition. It is plausible that evolution selected for certain conflict-prone dispostions in humans, such as vengefulness, aggression, risk-seeking, selfishness, dishon- esty, deception, and spitefulness towards out-groups (Grafen, 1990; Han, 2022; Konrad & Morath, 2012; McNally & Jackson, 2013; Nowak, 2006; Rusch, 2014). Such traits could also be selected for in ML systems that are trained in more competitive multi-agent settings. For example, this might happen if systems are selected based on their performance relative to other agents (and so one agent’s loss becomes another’s gain), or because their objectives are fundamentally opposed (such as when multiple agents are tasked with gaining or controlling a limited resource) (DiGiovanni et al., 2022; Ely & Szentes, 2023; Hendrycks, 2023; Possajennikov, 2000).33"