An Aristotelian ontology of instrumental goals: Structural features to be managed and not failures to be eliminated

TL;DR

This paper develops an Aristotelian ontological framework for understanding instrumental goals in AI, emphasizing their structural features as manageable aspects rather than failures to eliminate, with implications for AI governance.

Contribution

It introduces a novel Aristotelian ontology of instrumental goals, highlighting their structural nature and governance relevance in advanced AI systems.

Findings

Instrumental goals are structurally embedded in AI systems.

Certain enabling conditions are conditionally required for instrumental tendencies.

Instrumental behaviours can arise from chance intersections, not just design.

Abstract

Instrumental goals such as resource acquisition, power-seeking, and self-preservation are key to contemporary AI alignment research, yet the phenomenon's ontology remains under-theorised. This article develops an ontological account of instrumental goals and draws out governance-relevant distinctions for advanced AI systems. After systematising the dominant alignment literature on instrumental goals we offer an exploratory Aristotelian framework that treats advanced AI systems as complex artefacts whose ends are externally imposed through design, training and deployment. On a structural reading, Aristotle's notion of hypothetical necessity explains why, given an imposed end pursued over extended horizons in particular environments, certain enabling conditions become conditionally required, thereby yielding robust instrumental tendencies. On a contingent reading, accidental causation and chance-like intersections among training regimes, user inputs, infrastructure and deployment contexts can generate instrumental-goal-like behaviours not entailed by the imposed end-structure. This dual-aspect ontology motivates for governance and management approaches that treat instrumental goals as features of advanced AI systems to be managed rather than anomalies eliminable by technical interventions.