For example I've mostly stopped working on decision theory because it seems to help UFAI as much as FAI. The only safe topics within FAI that I can see are ethics (normative and meta) and meta-philosophy, which are not really things you can throw resources at.
I see many examples where ideas associated with decision theory (and surfacing from thinking about it) clarify philosophical or metaethical questions. For example, meaning of beliefs, of decisions, or observations, what influences decisions (and so where to look for preference), the way preference could be accessed through beliefs about it, all these things happen in context of certain setups of control and interpretation. I don't think it's possible to separate decision theory from FAI theory, and if we all stop developing FAI theory, we lose automatically.
The way I see it, even if we completely solve decision theory, there are so many other problems involved with building an FAI that the success probability (unless we first develop WBE or intelligence amplification) is still tiny. So working on decision theory is counterproductive if it raises the probability of UFAI coming before WBE/IA by even a small delta.
I don't think it's possible to separate decision theory from FAI theory, and if we all stop developing FAI theory, we lose automatically.
Of course I'm not suggesting we stop such work permanently, ...
Here is a short new publication from the Singularity Institute, on the 2-day workshop that followed Singularity Summit 2011.
Note the new publication design. We are currently porting our earlier publications to this template, too.