It's 1939. No one knows if it is possible to split an atom, no one knows how to split an atom in a controlled fashion, and no one knows how to use the splitting of an atom as a weapon capable of exterminating hundreds of thousands of civilians. There are no clear approaches to these problems.

Six years later, hundreds of thousands of civilians have been exterminated by the weaponized splitting of atoms.

A project that currently appears to be intractable may not remain so. If trustworthy upload technology were available to us today, then it would probably be a good idea to use it to develop FAI. But we don't have it yet, so if there is even a small chance that useful work will be accomplished by meat-brains we might as well take it.

We shouldn't neglect the development of upload technology and its precursors, but those fields are already receiving three or four orders of magnitude more funding and attention than FAI. It's clear where the marginal benefits are.

I'm saddened to see that your bottom line hasn't changed as a result of your series of posts on SIAI's PR.