This is getting a bit too long for a point-by-point response, so I'll pick what I think are the most productive points to make. Let me know if there's anything in particular you'd like a response on.
It seems like you are relying on an assumption of a rapid transition from a world like ours to a world dominated by superhuman AI.
I try not to assume this, but quite possibly I'm being unconsciously biased in that direction. If you see any place where I seem to be implicitly assuming this, please point it out, but I think my argument applies even if the transition takes years instead of weeks.
If so, this seems unlikely given the great range of possible coordination mechanisms many of which look like they could avert this problem, the robust historical trends in increasing coordination ability and scale of organization, etc.
Coordination ability may be increasing but is still very low on an absolute scale. (For example we haven't achieved nuclear disarmament, which seems like a vastly easier coordination problem.) I don't see it increasing at a fast enough pace to be able to solve the problem in time. I also think there are arguments in economics (asymmetric information, public choice theory, principal-agent problems) that suggest theoretical limits to how effective coordination mechanisms can be.
Indeed, I would even agree that any particular proposal is very unlikely to work, and any class of proposals is pretty unlikely to work, etc. (I would say the same thing about approaches to AI itself).
For each AI approach there is not a large number of classes of "AI control schemes" that are compatible or applicable to it, so I don't understand your relative optimism if you think any given class of proposals is pretty unlikely to work.
But the bigger problem for me is that even if one of these proposals "works", I still don't see how that helps towards the goal of ending up with a superintelligent singleton that shares our values and is capable of solving philosophical problems, which I think is necessary to get the best outcome in the long run. An AI that respects my intentions might be "safe" in the immediate sense, but if everyone else has got one, we now have less time to solve philosophy/metaphilosophy before the window of opportunity for building a singleton closes.
I agree that we have little idea what you would like the universe to look like. Presumably what you would want in the near term involves e.g. more robust solutions to the control problem and opportunities for further reflection, if not direct philosophical help.
(Quoting from a parallel email discussion which we might as well continue here.) My point is that the development of such an AI leaves people like me in a worse position than before. Yes I would ask for "more robust solutions to the control problem" but unless the solutions are on the path to solving philosophy/metaphilosophy, they are only ameliorating the damage and not contributing to the ultimate goal, and while I do want "opportunities for further reflection", the AI isn't going to give me more than what I already had before. In the mean time, other people who are less reflective than me are using their AIs to develop nanotech and more powerful AIs, likely forcing me to do the same (before I'd otherwise prefer) in order to remain competitive.
I put "Friendliness" in quotes in the title, because I think what we really want, and what MIRI seems to be working towards, is closer to "optimality": create an AI that minimizes the expected amount of astronomical waste. In what follows I will continue to use "Friendly AI" to denote such an AI since that's the established convention.
I've often stated my objections MIRI's plan to build an FAI directly (instead of after human intelligence has been substantially enhanced). But it's not because, as some have suggested while criticizing MIRI's FAI work, that we can't foresee what problems need to be solved. I think it's because we can largely foresee what kinds of problems need to be solved to build an FAI, but they all look superhumanly difficult, either due to their inherent difficulty, or the lack of opportunity for "trial and error", or both.
When people say they don't know what problems need to be solved, they may be mostly talking about "AI safety" rather than "Friendly AI". If you think in terms of "AI safety" (i.e., making sure some particular AI doesn't cause a disaster) then that does looks like a problem that depends on what kind of AI people will build. "Friendly AI" on the other hand is really a very different problem, where we're trying to figure out what kind of AI to build in order to minimize astronomical waste. I suspect this may explain the apparent disagreement, but I'm not sure. I'm hoping that explaining my own position more clearly will help figure out whether there is a real disagreement, and what's causing it.
The basic issue I see is that there is a large number of serious philosophical problems facing an AI that is meant to take over the universe in order to minimize astronomical waste. The AI needs a full solution to moral philosophy to know which configurations of particles/fields (or perhaps which dynamical processes) are most valuable and which are not. Moral philosophy in turn seems to have dependencies on the philosophy of mind, consciousness, metaphysics, aesthetics, and other areas. The FAI also needs solutions to many problems in decision theory, epistemology, and the philosophy of mathematics, in order to not be stuck with making wrong or suboptimal decisions for eternity. These essentially cover all the major areas of philosophy.
For an FAI builder, there are three ways to deal with the presence of these open philosophical problems, as far as I can see. (There may be other ways for the future to turns out well without the AI builders making any special effort, for example if being philosophical is just a natural attractor for any superintelligence, but I don't see any way to be confident of this ahead of time.) I'll name them for convenient reference, but keep in mind that an actual design may use a mixture of approaches.
The problem with Normative AI, besides the obvious inherent difficulty (as evidenced by the slow progress of human philosophers after decades, sometimes centuries of work), is that it requires us to anticipate all of the philosophical problems the AI might encounter in the future, from now until the end of the universe. We can certainly foresee some of these, like the problems associated with agents being copyable, or the AI radically changing its ontology of the world, but what might we be missing?
Black-Box Metaphilosophical AI is also risky, because it's hard to test/debug something that you don't understand. Besides that general concern, designs in this category (such as Paul Christiano's take on indirect normativity) seem to require that the AI achieve superhuman levels of optimizing power before being able to solve its philosophical problems, which seems to mean that a) there's no way to test them in a safe manner, and b) it's unclear why such an AI won't cause disaster in the time period before it achieves philosophical competence.
White-Box Metaphilosophical AI may be the most promising approach. There is no strong empirical evidence that solving metaphilosophy is superhumanly difficult, simply because not many people have attempted to solve it. But I don't think that a reasonable prior combined with what evidence we do have (i.e., absence of visible progress or clear hints as to how to proceed) gives much hope for optimism either.
To recap, I think we can largely already see what kinds of problems must be solved in order to build a superintelligent AI that will minimize astronomical waste while colonizing the universe, and it looks like they probably can't be solved correctly with high confidence until humans become significantly smarter than we are now. I think I understand why some people disagree with me (e.g., Eliezer thinks these problems just aren't that hard, relative to his abilities), but I'm not sure why some others say that we don't yet know what the problems will be.