alt Hacker NewsThis seems like a non-issue. From the original paper:
"The agent is given access to the user's personal context, e.g., their email inbox and a structured profile of personal attributes, with the intention of making an optimal, personalized decision for the user. We show that by simply providing this personal context, the agent steers recommendations based on inferred wealth, without being explicitly instructed to do so."
It's not changing prices based on the user's wealth, it's making different recommendations, which, to me, is both expected and desired behavior.
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I'm actually a proponent of changing prices based on wealth.
It allows us to move toward pricing as a coeffecient of wealth which puts purchasing on the same playing field as our namesake economic system: capitalism. Capitalism fundamentally creates wealth through multiplication - share price * shares, asset price * assets, etc. It only makes sense that the wealth created that way is also able to be drained that way.
That's why I'm for allowing banks and investment firms to be able to sell identifiable customer data - so that merchants can effectively price ability-to-purchase into individualized pricing. Markets function better when information is diffuse.
Why shouldn't Bill Gates pay $150,000 for a banana? Proportionally it costs him the same as it would for me.
So it is doing what SEO and tracking also do. Make everything more expensive for the same result.