Say, however, that you've built a metric that you think matches your values well and you put some powerful optimizer to work maximizing that metric. This optimizer might do many things you think are great, but it might be that the easiest ways to maximize the metric are the ones that pull it apart from your values. Perhaps after it's in place it turns out your metric included many things that only strongly correlated with what you cared about, where the correlation breaks down under maximization.

What confuses me is that the people who warn about this scenario with respect to AI are often the same people in favor of futarchy. They both involve trying to define your values and then setting an indifferent optimizer to work on them. If you think AI would be very dangerous but futarchy would be very good, why?

[1] This is a question people working in public health try to answer with Disability Weights for DALYs.