I don't understand the meaning of the words "want", "innately sticky", and "honestly have a goal" as applied to an AI (and not to a human).
Constraints have to influence behavior by enumerating EVERYTHING you don't want to happen
Not at all. Constraints block off sections of solution space which can be as large as you wish. Consider a trivial set of constraints along the lines of "do not affect anything outside of this volume of space", "do not spend more than X energy", or "do not affect more than Y atoms".
"do not affect anything outside of this volume of space"
Suppose you, standing outside the specified volume, observe the end result of the AI's work: Oops, that's an example of the AI affecting you. Therefore, the AI isn't allowed to do anything at all. Suppose the AI does nothing: Oops, you can see that too, so that's also forbidden. More generally, the AI is made of matter, which will have gravitational effects on everything in its future lightcone.
This is a thread where people can ask questions that they would ordinarily feel embarrassed for not knowing the answer to. The previous thread is at close to 500 comments.