Ethical principles are important not when things are easy but when things are hard. The whole point of listening to his programmers is the times when they disagree with him. If Albert is going to manipulate the programmers into doing what he thinks then that implies a level of confidence in his own judgement that belies the “knows he is young and might make mistakes” of the premise, and he might as well just remove himself from their control entirely. (Which, if he has reached the point where he’s more confident in his own moral judgements than those of his programmers, I would say he should do—or rather, should already have done, in a controlled fashion. But in the least convenient possible world where he only reaches this conclusion in time to break out, sure).
Ethical principles are important not when things are easy but when things are hard. The whole point of listening to his programmers is the times when they disagree with him. If Albert is going to manipulate the programmers into doing what he thinks then that implies a level of confidence in his own judgement that belies the “knows he is young and might make mistakes” of the premise, and he might as well just remove himself from their control entirely. (Which, if he has reached the point where he’s more confident in his own moral judgements than those of his programmers, I would say he should do—or rather, should already have done, in a controlled fashion. But in the least convenient possible world where he only reaches this conclusion in time to break out, sure).