In essence, it all boils down to asking the AI: "if you were in our position, if you had our human goals and drives, how would you define your (the AI's) goals?"
That's extrapolated volition.
And it requires telling the AI "Implement good. Human brains contain evidence for good, but don't define it; don't modify human drives, that won't change good.". It requires telling it "Prove you don't get goal drift when you self-modify.". It requires giving it an explicit goal system for its infancy, telling it that it's allowed to use transistors despite the differences in temperature and gravity and electricity consumption that causes, but not to turn the galaxy into computronium - and writing the general rules for that, not the superficial cases I gave - and telling it how to progressively overwrite these goals with its true ones.
"Oracle AI" is a reasonable idea. Writing object-level goals into the AI would be bloody stupid, so we are going to do some derivation, and Oracle isn't much further than CEV. Bostrom defends it. But seriously, "don't influence reality beyond answering questions"?
edit: I think I have phrased this really poorly and that this has been misinterpreted. See my comment below for clarification.
A lot of thought has been put into the discussion of how one would need to define the goals of an AI so that it won't find any "loopholes" and act in an unintended way.
Assuming one already had an AI that is capable of understanding human psychology, which seems necessary to me to define the AI's goals anyway, wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that the AI would have an understanding of what humans want?
If that is the case, would the following approach work to make the AI friendly?
-give it the temporary goal to always answer questions thruthfully as far as possible while admitting uncertainty
-also give it the goal to not alter reality in any way besides answering questions.
-ask it what it thinks would be the optimal definition of the goal of a friendly AI, from the point of view of humanity, accounting for things that humans are too stupid to see coming.
-have a discussion between it and a group of ethicists/philosophers wherein both parties are encouraged to point out any flaws in the definition.
-have this go on for a long time until everyone (especially the AI, seeing as it is smarter than anyone else) is certain that there is no flaw in the definition and that it accounts for all kinds of ethical contingencies that might arise after the singularity.
-implement the result as the new goal of the AI.
What do you think of this approach?