Ok. I am currently diagnosing the source of our disagrement as me being more agnostic about which AI architectures might succeed than you. I am willing to consider the kinds of minds that resemble modern messy non-foomy optimizers (e.g. communities of competing/interacting agents) as promising. That is, "bazaar minds," not just "cathedral minds." Given this agnosticism, I see value in "straight science" that worries about arranging possibly stupid/corrupt/evil agents in useful configurations that are not stupid/corrupt/evil.