Continued from above, to reduce TLDR-ness...

We have generic algorithms that do step 5. They don't always scale well, but that's an engineering problem, that a lot of people in fields outside AI are already working to solve. We have domain-specific algorithms some of which can do a decent job of step 3-- spam filters, recommendation engines, autocorrectors.

So, does this mean that what's really missing is a generic problem-representor?

Well, that and friendliness, but if we can articulate a coherent, unambiguous code of morality, we will still need a generic problem-representer to actually incorporate it into the optimization procedure.