By “fully general” I mean something like “With alignment process x, we could take the specification of any SI, apply x to it, and have an aligned version of that SI specification”. (I assume almost everyone thinks this isn’t achievable)
But we don’t need an approach that’s this strong: we don’t need to be able to align all, most, or even a small fraction of SIs. One is enough—and in principle we could build in many highly specific constraints by construction (given sufficient understanding).
This still seems very hard, but I don’t think there’s any straightforward argument for its impossibility/intractability. Most such arguments only work against the more general solutions—i.e. if we needed to be able to align any SI specification.
By “fully general” I mean something like “With alignment process x, we could take the specification of any SI, apply x to it, and have an aligned version of that SI specification”. (I assume almost everyone thinks this isn’t achievable)
But we don’t need an approach that’s this strong: we don’t need to be able to align all, most, or even a small fraction of SIs. One is enough—and in principle we could build in many highly specific constraints by construction (given sufficient understanding).
This still seems very hard, but I don’t think there’s any straightforward argument for its impossibility/intractability. Most such arguments only work against the more general solutions—i.e. if we needed to be able to align any SI specification.
Here’s a survey of a bunch of impossibility results if you’re interested.
These also apply to stronger results than we need (which is nice!).