Well, let me describe the sort of architecture I have in mind.
The AI has a "knowledge base", which is some sort of database containing everything it knows. The knowledge base includes a set of heuristics. The AI also has a "thought heap", which is a set of all the things it plans to think about, ordered by how promising the thoughts seem to be. Each thought is just a heuristic, maybe with some parameters. The AI works by taking a thought from the heap and doing whatever it says, repeatedly.
Heuristics would be restricted, though. They would be things like "try to figure out whether or not this number is irrational", or "think about examples". You couldn't say, "make two more copies of this heuristic", or "change your supergoal to something random". You could say "simulate what would happen if you changed your supergoal to something random", but heuristics like this wouldn't necessarily be harmful, because the AI wouldn't blindly copy the results of the simulation; it would just think about them.
It seems plausible to me that an AI could take off simply by having correct reasoning methods written into it from the start, and by collecting data about what questions are good to ask.
I found the paper I was talking about. The Basic AI Drives, by Stephen M. Omohundro.
From the paper:
...If we wanted to prevent a system from improving itself, couldn’t we just lock up its hardware and not tell it how to access its own machine code? For an intelligent system, impediments like these just become problems to solve in the process of meeting its goals. If the payoff is great enough, a system will go to great lengths to accomplish an outcome. If the runtime environment of the system does not allow it to modify its own machine code, it will be motiv
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.