You put it backwards.... making AI that cares about truly real stuff as the prime drive is likely impossible and certainly we don't know how to do that nor need to. edit: i.e. You don't have to sit and work and work and work and find how to make some positronic mind not care about the real world. You get this by simply omitting some mission-impossible work. Specifying what you want, in some form, is unavoidable.

Regarding verification, you can have the AI search for code that predicts the input data the best, and then if you are falsifying the data the code will include a model of your falsifications.