I think it's a question of what you program in, and what you let it figure out for itself. If you want to prove formally that it will behave in certain ways, you would like to program in explicitly, formally, what its goals mean. But I think that "human pleasure" is such a complicated idea that trying to program it in formally is asking for disaster. That's one of the things that you should definitely let the AI figure out for itself. Richard is saying that an AI as smart as a smart person would never conclude that human pleasure equals brain dopamine levels.

Eliezer is aware of this problem, but hopes to avoid disaster by being especially smart and careful. That approach has what I think is a bad expected value of outcome.