Thank you for this overview. A couple of thoughts:

1. There is a recent and interesting result by Miller et al. (2015, MIT) supporting the hypothesis that the cortex doesn't process tasks in highly specialized modules, which is perhaps some evidence for a ULM in the human brain.

2. The importance of redundancy in biological systems might be another piece evidence for ULMs.

3. You write that "Infant emotions appear to simplify down to a single axis of happy/sad", which I think is not true. Surprise, fear and embarrassment are for example very early emotions as well (can't find a citation for this, sorry).

4. Minor nitpick: I think it is clumsy to say: "a ULM is more powerful than a TM because a ULM can automatically programs itself", since a TM can likely emulate a ULM, it might just be a bad model for it (bad in the sense of representation efficiency).

5. Designing a body for a superintelligence will possibly still be a difficult task. What makes humans friendly is, I think, largely a result of (1) a dependency on others due a need for maintaining a body and needs to interact with other people (conversation, physical contact), and (2) empathy. That is, being emotionally disconnected from other humans is one way to turn against them. If you don't have these emotional responses deeply built into a body for a ULM, the AI will probably turn out to be indifferent towards humans leading to a large set of other problems.

6. You write that Yudkowsky's box problem is a strawman and a distraction. How do you arrive at this conclusion exactly?