I listened to your talk until I realized I could just read the essay :)

I partly agree with you. You say:

Evolution by random mutations pretty-much sucks as a search strategy:

Sucks is not quite descriptive enough. Random mutation is slow, but that is not really relevant to my point - as I said - given enough time it is very robust. And sex transfer speeds that up dramatically, and then intelligence speeds up evolutionary search dramatically.

yes intelligent search is a large - huge - potential speedup on top of genetic evolution alone.

But we need to understand this in the wider context ... you yourself say:

One of the reasons genetic algorithms get used at all is because we do not yet have machine intelligence.

Ahh but we already have human intelligence.

Intelligence still uses an evolutionary search strategy, it is just internalized and approximate. Your brain considers a large number of potential routes in a highly compressed statistical approximation of reality, and the most promising eventually get written up or coded up and become real designs in the real world.

But this entire process is still all evolutionary.

And regardless, the approximate simulation that intelligence such as our brain uses does have limitations - mainly precision. Some things are just way too complex to simulate accurately in our brain, so we have to try them in detailed computer simulations.

Likewise, if you are designing a simple circuit space, then a simpler GA search running on a fast computer can almost certainly find the optimal solution way faster than a general intelligence - similar to an optimized chess algorithm.

A general intelligence is a huge speed up for evolution, but it is just one piece in a larger system .. You also need deep computer simulation, and you still have evolution operating at the world-level