Why can't we program hard stops into AI, where it is required to pause and ask for further instruction?
Because instructions are words, and "ask for instructions" implies an ability to understand and a desire to follow. The desire to follow instructions according to their givers' intentions is more-or-less a restatement of the Hard Problem of FAI itself: how do we formally specify a utility function that converges to our own in the limit of increasing optimization power and autonomy?
If you are worrying about the dangers of human level or greater AI, you are tacitly taking the problem of natural language interpretation to have been solved, so the above is an appeal to Mysterious Selective Stupidity.
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