They are entitled to assume they could be applied, not necessarily that they would be. At some point, there's going to have to be something that tells the AI to, in effect, "use the knowledge and definitions in your knowledge base to honestly do X [X = some NL objective]". This gap may be easy to bridge, or hard; no-one's suggested any way of bridging it so far.

There's only a gap if you start from the assumption that a compartmentalised UF is in some way easy, natural or preferable. However, your side of the debate has never shown that.

At some point, there's going to have to be something that tells the AI to, in effect, "use the knowledge and definitions in your knowledge base to honestly do X [X = some NL objective]".

No...you don't have to show a fan how to make a whirring sound... use of updatable knowledge to specify goals is a natural consequence of some designs.

It might be possible; it might be trivial.

You are assuming it is difficult, with little evidence.

But there's no evidence in that direction so far, and the designs that people have actually proposed have been disastrous.

Designs that bridge a gap, or designs that intrinsically don't have one?

I'll work at bridging this gap, and see if I can solve it to some level of approximation.

Why not examine the assumption that there has to be a gap?