"Motivability" seems to be a red herring. When we get the first AI capable of strongly affecting the real world, what makes you privilege the hypothesis that the AI's actions and mistakes will be harmless to us?
If some misguided FAI fool manages to make an AI that has it's goals somehow magically defined in the territory rather than in the map, in non-wireheadable way, then yes, it may be extremely harmful.
Just about everyone else who's working on neat AIs (the practical ones), have the goals defined on the internal representations, and as such the wireheading is a perfectly valid perfect solution to the goals. The AI is generally prevented from wireheading itself via constraints, but in so much as the AI has a desire, that's the desire to wirehead.
One of the most annoying arguments when discussing AI is the perennial "But if the AI is so smart, why won't it figure out the right thing to do anyway?" It's often the ultimate curiosity stopper.
Nick Bostrom has defined the "Orthogonality thesis" as the principle that motivation and intelligence are essentially unrelated: superintelligences can have nearly any type of motivation (at least, nearly any utility function-bases motivation). We're trying to get some rigorous papers out so that when that question comes up, we can point people to standard, and published, arguments. Nick has had a paper accepted that points out the orthogonality thesis is compatible with a lot of philosophical positions that would seem to contradict it.
I'm hoping to complement this with a paper laying out the positive arguments in favour of the thesis. So I'm asking you for your strongest arguments for (or against) the orthogonality thesis. Think of trying to convince a conservative philosopher who's caught a bad case of moral realism - what would you say to them?
Many thanks! Karma and acknowledgements will shower on the best suggestions, and many puppies will be happy.