People like Andrew Critch and Paul Christiano have criticized MIRI in the past for their "pivotal act" strategy. The latter can be described as "build superintelligence and use it to take unilateral world-scale actions in a manner inconsistent with existing law and order" (e.g. the notorious "melt all GPUs" example). The critics say (justifiably IMO), this strategy looks pretty hostile to many actors and can trigger preemptive actions against the project attempting it and generally foster mistrust.

Is there a good alternative? The critics tend to assume slow-takeoff multipole scenarios, which makes the comparison with their preferred solutions to be somewhat "apples and oranges". Suppose that we do live in a hard-takeoff singleton world, what then? One answer is "create a trustworthy, competent, multinational megaproject". Alright, but suppose you can't create a multinational megaproject, but you can build aligned AI unilaterally. What is a relatively cooperative thing you can do which would still be effective?

Here is my proposed rough sketch of such a plan^[1]:

• Commit to not make anyone predictably regret supporting the project or not opposing it. This rule is the most important and the one I'm the most confident of by far. In an ideal world, it should be more-or-less sufficient in itself. But in the real world, it might be still useful to provide more tangible details, which the next items try to do.
• Within the bounds of Earth, commit to obey the international law, and local law at least inasmuch as the latter is consistent with international law, with only two possible exceptions (see below). Notably, this allows for actions such as (i) distributing technology that cures diseases, reverses aging, produces cheap food etc. (ii) lobbying for societal improvements (but see superpersuation clause below).
• Exception 1: You can violate any law if it's absolutely necessary to prevent a catastrophe on the scale comparable with a nuclear war or worse, but only to the extent it's necessary for that purpose. (e.g. if a lab is about to build unaligned AI that would kill millions of people and it's not possible to persuade them to stop or convince the authorities to act in a timely manner, you can sabotage it.)^[2]
• Build space colonies. These space colonies will host utopic societies and most people on Earth are invited to immigrate there.
• Exception 2: A person held in captivity in a manner legal according to local law, who faces death penalty or is treated in a manner violating accepted international rules about treatment of prisoners, might be given the option to leave to the colonies. If they exercise this option, their original jurisdiction is permitted to exile them from Earth permanently and/or bar them from any interaction with Earth than can plausibly enable activities illegal according to that jurisdiction^[3].
• Commit to adequately compensate any economy hurt by emigration to the colonies or other disruption by you. For example, if space emigration causes the loss of valuable labor, you can send robots to supplant it.
• Commit to not directly intervene in international conflicts or upset the balance of powers by supplying military tech to any side, except in cases when it is absolutely necessary to prevent massive violations of international law and human rights.
• Commit to only use superhuman persuasion when arguing towards a valid conclusion via valid arguments, in a manner that doesn't go against the interests of the person being persuaded. 

1. ^{^}

   Importantly, this makes stronger assumptions about the kind of AI you can align than MIRI-style pivotal acts. Essentially, it assumes that you can directly or indirectly ask the AI to find good plans consistent with the commitments below, rather than directing it to do something much more specific. Otherwise, it is hard to use Exception 1 (see below) gracefully.

2. ^{^}

   A more conservative alternative is to limit Exception 1 to catastrophes that would spill over to the space colonies (see next item).

3. ^{^}

   It might be sensible to consider a more conservative version which doesn't have Exception 2, even though the implications are unpleasant.