Game Theory only helps us if it's impossible to deceive others. If one is able to engage in deception, the dominant strategy becomes to pretend to support CEV FAI while actually working on your own personal God in a jar. AI development in particular seems an especially susceptible domain for deception. The creation of a working AI is a one time event, it's not like most stable games in nature which allow one to detect defections of hundreds of iterations. The creation of a working AI (FAI or uFAI) is so complicated that it's impossible for others to check if any given researcher is defecting or not.
Our best hope then is for the AI project to be so big it cannot be controlled by a single entity and definitely not by a single person. If it only takes guy in a basement getting lucky to make an AI go FOOM, we're doomed. If it takes ten thousand researchers collaborating in the biggest group coding project ever, we're probably safe. This is why doing work on CEV is so important. So we can have that piece of the puzzle already built when the rest of AI research catches up and is ready to go FOOM.
This is for anyone in the LessWrong community who has made at least some effort to read the sequences and follow along, but is still confused on some point, and is perhaps feeling a bit embarrassed. Here, newbies and not-so-newbies are free to ask very basic but still relevant questions with the understanding that the answers are probably somewhere in the sequences. Similarly, LessWrong tends to presume a rather high threshold for understanding science and technology. Relevant questions in those areas are welcome as well. Anyone who chooses to respond should respectfully guide the questioner to a helpful resource, and questioners should be appropriately grateful. Good faith should be presumed on both sides, unless and until it is shown to be absent. If a questioner is not sure whether a question is relevant, ask it, and also ask if it's relevant.