Chaining God is Stuart Armstrong's term for his proposed method of maintaining control over a superhuman AGI. Traditional AGI plans involve the creation of a Seed AI which recursively improves itself. As it self-improves, human abilities will become drastically insufficient to comprehend the AGI's program enough to trust it, However, the original Seed AI was simple enough for us to understand and trust, and it will likewise be capable of understanding and trusting the successor it built. By having each iteration of the AGI improve a copy of itself only, a chain of AGI's which understand the AGI they created and are understood by their creator can be used to trust even the most complex AGI.
Armstrong proposes a number of issues with the chain design:
This is a very conservative approach to AGI design, and presents a large opportunity cost. Armstrong believes the chain approach would be unlikely to produce anywhere near the best possible future, since the AGI chain would learn from present human values only. Each improved layer of AGI would be limited in improvement to ensure its creator could understand it. With supervision on happening at each level, an AGI would take longer to develop and when starting over repeatedly the seed AI would always have to be humanly comprehensible. He does believe a AGI chain is a simple way to create Friendly Artificial Intelligence.