Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on What can you do with an Unfriendly AI? - Less Wrong
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Indeed, by saving themselves I was appealing to my analogy. This relies on the construction of a utility function such that human generosity now is more valuable than world domination later. I can write down many such utility functions easily, as contrasted with the difficulty of describing friendliness, so I can at least hope to design an AI which has one of them.
What you can do when you can write down stable utility functions - after you have solved the self-modification stability problem - but you can't yet write down CEV - is a whole different topic from this sort of AI-boxing!
I don't think I understand this post.
My claim is that it is easier to write down some stable utility functions than others. This is intimately related to the OP, because I am claiming as a virtue of my approach to boxing that it leaves us with the problem of getting an AI to follow essentially any utility function consistently. I am not purporting to solve that problem here, just making the claim that it is obviously no harder and almost obviously strictly easier than friendliness.