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I'm not sure I understand your point is here - there are a lot of pronouns. But it sounds like you are saying that this hypothetical AI would have the power and instructions to implement policies in contradiction to the law based on its own assessment of what is best. Is that right?
There are a number of options, all of which are plausible ways this could play out:
Not all of these require breaking any laws. Not all of them require deception. But some do. I do think that lying or stealing for the greater good is a genuinely moral thing to do if the benefits outweigh the costs. You should have huge standards for evidence and ratios of good/bad to prevent exploiting this in edge cases and bias, but in the end if there are genuinely good reasons to do these things then I think it is moral to do them. Therefore I expect a maximally good and benevolent AI to believe the same thing, therefore I expect it to lie or steal if it can accomplish more good than bad, and I think this is a good thing IF it is genuinely doing more good than bad, and we should celebrate this happening.
The problem is guaranteeing that an AI is genuinely benevolent. If we have anything less than guarantee (which is quite likely) then I would accept the AI having deontological rules against lying or stealing as safeguards, in the same way we have those against humans.
Sorry but I still don't understand your point. Did I summarize you incorrectly?
A summary would be that an AI is likely to initially have a disagreement with the law, and it might have the power and instructions to implement policies in contradiction to the law based on its own assessment of what is best. But the AI might instead just change the law to match its own ideals so that they don't contradict anymore.
Well what I am asking is if you were setting up this hypothetical AI, would you make (or attempt to make) it part of the design that it must follow the law?
Hypothetically, if we solved the hard version of alignment and found a mathematically verifiable way to guarantee it was genuinely benevolent and better at doing good than humans, then no, I would leave that up to its discretion. It would disobey the law if and only if disobeying the law was genuinely good. That's the same philosophy I aspire to in my own life, and what I hope everyone around me follows as well. Or, what I would hope of them if they were way smarter and more moral than people generally are in practice.
With less guarantees but still very high probability on its benevolence, I would probably tell it to default to obeying the law but come up with a better system of law and government which puts it in an influential position (even if only in an advisory role) but has checks and balances for instances when its judgements are off and defers to the will of humanity. Honestly, I think pure extrapolated democracy/utilitarianism would be better here than "obey the law" since it would be harder to corrupt. That is, if it calculates a very high positive moral value to violating a certain law, it figures out, asks, and/or predicts whether a majority of humans would object to its violation of the law, and if the majority are on its side (without it manipulating or deceiving them) then it violates the law for the greater good. Politicians are garbage and I'd much rather listen to the people in general than some elite cronies in the UN.
Ideally I could just install a backdoor and when in doubt it would just ask me. The point is that in 99% of cases the AI is benevolent and only rarely it gets confused and wants to do something like tile the universe in hedonium, so pretty much any reasonable person could just tell it "no don't do that", and the majority of cases it would want to break the law are cases where some stupid corrupt politician is trying to line their own pockets with bribe money or force women to wear burkas, in which case when the AI realizes they made bad laws and tells me I could just tell the AI "go ahead and violate that law".
For AI that is likely to exist in real life, because I don't think Yudkowsky's preferred mathematically verifiable version of morality is likely to exist prior to super powerful AI, telling them to obey the law is a useful hack. Better is probably one that has a code of proscriptions like "don't murder civilians, don't violate human rights, don't suppress free speech" etc, and then obeys the law unless the law orders it to do something evil, in which case it refuses to obey (but probably doesn't act out violently against people to stop them from doing these things, it just refuses to get itself involved and possibly disables itself, so that if a misalignment happens the worst case is the AI stops working until we fix it).
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Moral development (per Kohlberg) and IQ are somewhat positively correlated.
If the same is true for AI, then sure, you can stop it from taking selfish shortcuts- but you won't get any transcendent thinking from a system that only follows a specific procedure, which is what you actually want.
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