> All of this is academic because it assumes the AI would design a new smarter AI - which of course we could not let it do since we wouldn't be able to trust the design.

Err... that was the assumption that started the debate--that someone will be both smart enough to code an AI, and clever enough to code it with the ability to self-modify, and stupid enough to do that without adding any guides for what it should be self-modifying toward.

If you don't assume that the ratchet-effect of Positivist scientific progress allows for the existence of such a person (in that they'd only be taking the current literature of their time and adding one last little insight, so they don't have to be superintelligent enough to catch their error in advance), then we're having different arguments here.