It turns out that the alignment problem has some known solutions in the human case. First, there is an interesting special case namely where there are no decisions (or only a limited number of fully accounted for decisions) for the intelligent agent to be made - basically throwing all decision-making capabilities out of the window and only using object recognition and motion control (to use technical terms). With such an agent (we might call it zero-decision agent or zero-agent) scientific methods could be applied on all details of the work process and high efficiency reached: Scientific Management (also known as Taylorism). Obviously the unions hated it and it was later outlawed. I think something might be learned from this approach for AI control: Maybe we can build on top of a known solution for a zero-agent and prove that certain known decision classes are also safe.
Maybe other insights from management theory - which after all is about aligning intelligent agents - could also transfer. The alignment problem is called Principal-Agent Problem in the literature and there are quite a few Solutions to Principal-Agent Problems in Firms (Gary Miller 2005). The approaches should sound familiar: Solutions Based on
I wonder how could one outlaw a thing like this. Suppose that most managers believe that Taylorism works, but it is illegal to use it (under that name). Wouldn't they simply reintroduce the practices, step by step, under a different name? I mean, if you use a different name, different keywords, different rationalization, and introduce it in small steps, it's no longer the same thing, right? It just becomes "industry standards". (If there happens to be an exact definition, of course, this only becomes an exercise how close to the forbidden thing you can legally get.)
From the Wikipedia article, I got the impression that what was made illegal was the use of stop-watch. Okay, so instead of measuring how many seconds you need to make a widget, I am going to measure how many widgets you make each day -- that is legal, right? The main difference is that you can take a break, assuming it will allow you to work faster afterwards. Which may be quite an important difference. It this what it is about?