The author exhibits the same starry-eyed ideals that people tend to get when trying to explain away the simplicity of designing an "intelligent" agent (for any definition of "intelligent"): they think they can just provide the machine with basic, unquestionable axioms that should underpin the core, and everything will somehow work itself out from there; and at the very least, if those core beliefs are never violated, we've got ourselves a pretty safe system.

Well, as we can see, it's devilishly difficult to prevent a machine from violating those core beliefs. But the problem is, even those core beliefs have nuance and exception: war is bad? Not if you run an arms company. Humans are valuable? Not if you're an insurance company who can make more money on human misery than on human health. And the list goes on. Statistics won't take care of it when a machine makes a decision based on some internal logic that it can squeeze out of our vague rules.