I don't get this post. There is no big mystery to asynchronous communication - a process looks for messages whenever it is convenient for it to do so, very much like we check our mail-boxes when it is convenient for us. Although it is not clear to me how asynchronous communication helps in building an AI, I don't see any underspecification here. And if people (including Brooks) have actually used the architecture for building robots, that at least must be clear proof that there is a real architecture here.

Btw, from my understanding, Thrun's team made heavy use of supervised learning - the same paradigm that Eliezer knocked down as being unFriendly in his AI risks paper.