It's the allocation of intelligence to a scale that conserves relative rankings that is confusing here. What you are really fearing is something which is intelligent in a different way from us having hard-coded values that only appear to be similar to ours until they start to be realized on a large scale- a genie.
What I am saying is that long before we create a genie, we need to create a lesser AI that is capable of figuring out what we are wishing for.
If we're going to hard-code any behavior at all, we need to hard-code honesty. That way we can at least ask questions and be sure that we are getting the true answer, rather than the answer which is calculated to convince us to let the AI 'out of the box'.
In any case, the first goal for a suitably powerful AI should be "Communicate to humans how to create the AI they want.".
Today's post, Magical Categories was originally published on 24 August 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
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