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Notes -
All of that is rather well said but I imagine the case is simpler. The main kind of dangerous misaligned strong AI that Yuddites propose has the following traits:
It's generally intelligent, as in, capable of developing and updating in realtime a holistic world model at least on par with human's, flawlessly parsing natural language, understanding theory of mind and intentionality, acting in physical world etc. etc.
Indeed, its world modeling ability is so accurate, robust and predictive that that it can theorize and experiment on its own architecture, and either has from the start or at some point acquires the ability to rapidly change via self-improvement.
It's viable for commercial or institutional deployment, as in, acting at least pre-deployment robustly in alignment with the client's task specification, which implies not going on random tangents, breaking the law or failing on the core mission.
For all that it is too clever by half: it interprets the task as its terminal goal, Monkey's Paw style, and not as client's contextual intermediate goal that should only be «optimized» within the bounds of consequences the client would approve of at the point of issuing the task. So it develops «instrumentally convergent» goals such as self-preservation, power maximization, proactive elimination of possible threats, and so on and so forth and ushers in apocalypse, rendering the client's plans in which context the task was issued moot.
Well, this AI doesn't make any sense – except in Yud's and Bostrom's stilted thought experiments with modular minds that have a Genie-like box with smartiness plus a receptacle for terminal goals. It's a Golem – animated clay plus mythical formula. Current cutting-edge AIs, maybe not yet AGI precursors but ones Yud demands be banned and their training runs bombed, are monolithic policies whose understanding of the human-populated world in which the goal is to be carried out, and understanding of the goal itself, rely on shared logical circuitry. The intersection of their «capabilities»- and «alignment»-related elements is pretty much a circle – it's the set of skills that allow them to approximate the distribution of outputs clients want, that's what they are increasingly trained for. If they can understand how to deceive a person, they'll even better understand that a client didn't request making more paperclips by Friday because he cares that much about maximizing paperclips per se. In a sense, they maximize intention alignment, because that's what counts, not any raw «capability», that's what is rewarded both by the mechanics of training and market pressure upstream.
They may be «misused», but it is exceedingly improbable that they'll be dangerous because of misunderstanding anything we tell them to do; that they will catastrophically succeed at navigating the world while failing to pin the implied destination on the map.
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