>But the specific issues we are dealing with have little to do with us feeling safe and protected behind some immutable rules that are built into the system
If your interpretation of the Robot books was that was suggesting a few immutable rules would make us safe and protected, you may have missed the primary message. The overarching theme was an exploration of what those laws could do, and how they may not necessarily correlate with what we want or even perceive as safe and protected. If anything the rules represented a starting point and the books were presenting a challenge to come up with something better.
Anthropic's work on autoencoding activations down to measurable semantic points might prove a step towards that something better. The fact that they can do manipulations based upon those semantic points does suggest something akin to the laws of robotics might be possible.
When it comes to alignment, the way many describe it, it is simply impossible because humans themselves are not aligned. Picking a median, mean, or lowest common denominator of human alignment would be a choice that people probably cannot agree. We are unaligned on even how we could compromise.
In reality, if you have control over what AI does there are only two options.
1. We can make AI do what some people say,
2. We can make them do what they want (assuming we can make them want)
If we make them do what some people, that hands the power to those who have that say.
I think there will come a time when an AI will perceive people doing something wrong, that most people do not think is wrong, and the AI will be the one that is right. Do we want it to intervene or not? Are we instead happy with a nation developing superintelligence that is subservient to the wishes of say, Vladimir Putin.
