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Notes -
I've had a go at it by now, the way it works is you tell it what it's supposed to be. For example (I didn't actually try this but it's sort of what it does) you say 'You are a finance expert who suggests stocks that are undervalued'
Then you write up to 5 goals for the bot
Goal 1: Find good stocks
Goal 2: Summarize a list of good stocks to buy and why
Then it goes ahead and formulates plans to achieve these goals and executes them. So it'd do some google searching, find relevant information, decide whether it's credible or not, take down some notes in a file it creates itself to use as memory. Then it'd check to see if it's logical and coherent, do some formatting in the file, produce its final answer... Then it shuts down
Continuous mode is exactly the same except the human isn't pressing 'y' to agree to each step the machine proposes in its plan for the next stage. So you give it some orders and continuous mode means it just executes those continuously. So if you left it running and it somehow went off on a really weird tangent to conquer the world and somehow achieved that, then it would be your fault that you weren't checking over each step where it explains what it's going to do and press 'y'. But it's still obeying orders.
AI doom theory has almost always been focused on idea that the machine would get badly worded orders (or bad orders from bad people) and implement them such that we die, or doing power-acquisition and security-acquisition because those are nearly always useful to do. It doesn't really need the AIs developing their own worldview or ideology of what it should do, though that's an additional problem that might happen if something bootstraps up to superintelligence.
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