What have I missed? How does philosophy bring anything useful to the table?
You appear to have missed philosophy. If you take a historical view, all of our contemporary subjects come from philosophy. The core of philosophy is precisely the sort of things we care about here - having an accurate picture of the world and understanding its true nature. To that end, ancient philosophers such as Aristotle invented logic, studied the natural world, discovered the inner workings of the human body, and started to investigate the laws that tie together everything in the world.
Properly defining philosophy in current times is somewhat difficult based on this - now what was once called philosophy is instead called "Science" and other fields. So what is left is anything we don't already have an answer for. Philosophers are those who know what questions still need to be asked, and care about investigating them in a manner that will give them a more accurate picture of the world.
To be a little more concrete (to give a specific example), the field of Ethics is considered a subfield of philosophy (largely because its questions are not yet settled), and one relevant question to FAI is simply "How should an AI behave?", which is an ethical question.
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Considering that an alicorn is a unicorn's horn, I think mine is a fairly girly username. Unless there is a unicorn-loving male element I should be aware of.
Interesting... all the places I've seen the word, it meant a winged unicorn*. But reading this post drove me to look it up, and I did find both definitions. Less Wrong: raising new interest in definitions of mythological creature parts! :)
*Speaking of mythological definitions, I learned somewhere to distinguish between an alicorn, which has the goat-like body, lion's tail, beard, etc. of a unicorn, vs a horned pegasus, which has horse-like features. Not sure where that came from, but it's firmly implanted in my stores of useless knowledge.