Would it be fair to say that your philosophy is similar to davidad's? Both of you seem to ultimately value some hard-to-define measure of complexity. He thinks the best way to maximize complexity is to develop technology, whereas you think the best way is to preserve evolution.

I think that evolution will lead to a local maximum of complexity, which we can't "help" it avoid. The reason is that the universe contains many environmental niches that are essentially duplicates of each other, leading to convergent evolution. For example Earth contains lots of species that are similar to each other, and within each species there's huge amounts of redundancy. Evolution creates complexity, but not remotely close to maximum complexity. Imagine if each individual plant/animal had a radically different design, which would be possible if they weren't constrained by "survival of the fittest".

Whereas the entire purpose of FAI is to trap the universe in a local maximum.

Huh? The purpose of FAI is to achieve the global maximum of whatever utility function we give it. If that utility function contains a term for "complexity", which seems plausible given people like you and davidad (and even I'd probably prefer greater complexity to less, all else being equal), then it ought to at least get somewhat close to the global complexity maximum (since the constraint of simultaneously trying to maximize other values doesn't seem too burdensome, unless there are people who actively disvalue complexity).