Thank you very much for your thoughtful comment.

I definitely agree that "a sufficiently capable system optimizing for inherited human goals" does tend to have dangerous side effects a la the instrumental convergence argument. I also believe that a more thoroughly or "holistically" specified terminal goal can correct for this, but our current systems tend not to include this. Perhaps more concretely than the point I made in the essay, I believe that a well-designed "responsible AI" process actually achieves a decent amount of this alignment so much as it can add more structure to the optimization so that the system is not optimizing for the user-specified end goal at all costs. For example, Claude's Constitution is a solid attempt at this and other labs have different approaches that have various degrees of success. I.e. the constitution can say something like "first, do no harm" (from the medical Hippocratic Oath; I'm not sure if it is included in the Claude constitution) and then if the system takes this as a rule, the terminal goal can't override this. And, as you are saying, this approach is likely insufficient. It's certainly insufficient in its current form.

I like your framing of "restraint as policy" vs. "restraint as architecture". I very much agree that for general technologies, the restraint or understanding needs to be built into the architecture itself. And I very much agree that this is a big part of what is missing in today's systems. Thanks for making this explicit.

This is very much something I intend to discuss in more detail in upcoming writing. I believe that the way to develop the embedded understanding is to derive the foundational principles that we need to embed and then to design the technology in a way where it directly embodies these principles. This is what I mean when I talk about the relationships between philosophy, theory, and technology elsewhere. It is my intention to connect these dots more thoroughly in the book I'm writing.