Gah, no, my point wasn't about starting over from scratch at all. It was that most AGI architectures include self-modification as a core and inseparable part of the architecture. For example, by running previously evolved thinking processes. You can't just say "we'll disable the self-modification for safety's sake" -- you'd be giving it a total lobotomy!

I was then only making a side point that even if you designed an architecture that didn't self-modify -- unlikely for performance reasons -- it would still discover how to wire itself into self-modification eventually. So that doean't really solve the safety issue, alone.