Some villain then asks how to reliably destroy the world, and follows the given answer.
Alternatively: A philosopher asks for the meaning of life, and the Oracle returns an extremely persuasive answer which convinces most of people that life is worthless.
Another alternative: After years of excellent work, the Oracle gains so much trust that people finally start to implement a possibility to ask less formal questions, like "how to maximise human utility", and then follow the given advice. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), unnoticed mistake in the definition of human utility has slipped through the safety checks.
Unfortunately (but not surprisingly), unnoticed mistake in the definition of human utility has slipped through the safety checks.
Yes, that's the main difficulty behind friendly AI in general. This does not constitute a specific way that it could go wrong.
At the recent London meet-up someone (I'm afraid I can't remember who) suggested that one might be able to solve the Friendly AI problem by building an AI whose concerns are limited to some small geographical area, and which doesn't give two hoots about what happens outside that area. Cipergoth pointed out that this would probably result in the AI converting the rest of the universe into a factory to make its small area more awesome. In the process, he mentioned that you can make a "fun game" out of figuring out ways in which proposed utility functions for Friendly AIs can go horribly wrong. I propose that we play.
Here's the game: reply to this post with proposed utility functions, stated as formally or, at least, as accurately as you can manage; follow-up comments explain why a super-human intelligence built with that particular utility function would do things that turn out to be hideously undesirable.
There are three reasons I suggest playing this game. In descending order of importance, they are: