I'd suggest reading Failed Utopia #4-2.
One problem is that if it can create new people, any rules about changing people would be pointless. If it cannot create new people, then it ends up with a Utopia for 6 billion people, which is nothing compared to what could have been.
This could be fixed by letting it rewire human brains, but limiting it to doing what humans would be okay with, if it didn't rewire their brains. This is better, but it still runs into problems in that people wouldn't fully understand what's going on. What you need to do is program it so that it does what people would like if they were smarter, faster, and more the people they wish they were. In other words, use CEV.
Also, it's very hard to define what exactly constitutes "rewiring a human brain". If you make it too general, the AI can't do anything, because that would affect human brains. If you make it too specific, the AI would have some slight limitations on how exactly it messes with people's minds.
Thanks for the link, I'll give it a read.
Creating new people is potentially a problem, but I'm not entirely convinced. Let me elaborate. When you say:
What you need to do is program it so that it does what people would like if they were smarter, faster, and more the people they wish they were. In other words, use CEV.
Doesn't this kind of restate in different words that it models human well-being and tries to maximize that? I imagine when you phrased it this way that such an AI wouldn't create new people that are easier to maximize because that isn't wha...
I put "trivial" in quotes because there are obviously some exceptionally large technical achievements that would still need to occur to get here, but suppose we had an AI with a utilitarian utility function of maximizing subjective human well-being (meaning, well-being is not something as simple as physical sensation of "pleasure" and depends on the mental facts of each person) and let us also assume the AI can model this "well" (lets say at least as well as the best of us can deduce the values of another person for their well-being). Finally, we will also assume that the AI does not possess the ability to manually rewire the human brain to change what a human values. In other words, the ability for the AI to manipulate another person's values is limited by what we as humans are capable of today. Given all this, is there any concern we should have about making this AI; would it succeed in being a friendly AI?
One argument I can imagine for why this fails friendly AI is the AI would wire people up to virtual reality machines. However, I don't think that works very well, because a person (except Cypher from the Matrix) wouldn't appreciate being wired into a virtual reality machine and having their autonomy forcefully removed. This means the action does not succeed in maximizing their well-being.
But I am curious to hear what arguments exist for why such an AI might still fail as a friendly AI.