I agree. Friendly AI may be incoherent and impossible. In fact, it looks impossible right now. But that’s often how problems look right before we make a few key insights that make things clearer, and show us (e.g.) how we were asking a wrong question in the first place. The reason I advocate Friendly AI research (among other things) is because it may be the only way to secure a desirable future for humanity, (see “Complex Value Systems are Required to Realize Valuable Futures.”) even if it looks impossible. That is why Yudkowsky once proclaimed: “Shut Up and Do the Impossible!” When we don’t know how to make progress on a difficult problem, sometimes we need to hack away at the edges.

Just a suggestion for future dialogs: The amount of Less Wrong jargon, links to Less Wrong posts explaining that jargon, and the Yudkowsky "proclamation" in this paragraph is all a bit squicky, alienating and potentially condescending. And I think they muddle the point you're making.

Anyway, biting Pei's bullet for a moment, if building an AI isn't safe, if it's, like Pei thinks, similar to educating a child (except, presumably, with a few orders of magnitude more uncertainty about the outcome) that sounds like a really bad thing to be trying to do. He writes :

I don’t think a good education theory can be “proved” in advance, pure theoretically. Rather, we’ll learn most of it by interacting with baby AGIs, just like how many of us learn how to educate children.

There's a very good chance he's right. But we're terrible at educating children. Children routinely grow up to be awful people. And this one lacks the predictable, well-defined drives and physical limits that let us predict how most humans will eventually act (pro-social, in fear of authority). It sounds deeply irresponsible, albeit, not of immediate concern. Pei's argument is a grand rebuttal of the proposal that humanity spend more time on AI safety (why fund something that isn't possible?) but no argument at all against the second part of the proposal-- defund AI capabilities research.