I agree with everything you've written as far as my modal hypothesis goes, but I also think we're going to lose in that case, so I've sort of renormalized to focus my attention at least somewhat more on worlds where for some reason academic/industry AI approaches don't work, even if that requires some sort of deus ex machina. My intuition says that highly recursive narrow AI style techniques should give you AGI, but to some extent this does go against e.g. the position of many philosophers of mind, and in this case I hope they're right. Trying to imagine intermediate scenarios led me to think about this kinda stuff.

It would of course be incredibly foolish to entirely write off worlds where AGI is relatively easy, but I also think we should think about cases where for whatever reason that isn't the case, and if it's not the case then SingInst is in a uniquely good position to build uFAI.