Action Guidance and AI Alignment

I offer a preliminary conceptual framework for evaluating AI alignment projects. It is based on the concept of action guidance. In 1 and 2, I explain action guidance and its importance to AI alignment. I introduce the 'Guidance Framework' in 3. In 4, I show how it can be applied to two different sorts of questions: the practical question of how to design a specific AI agent (my example is a fictional ocean-cleaning robot), and the theoretical question of how to evaluate a specific AI alignment proposal (my example is Stuart Russell's 'binary approach'). In 5 I discuss limitations of the framework and opportunities for further research.