> And that action is...what exactly?
I would guess A. the development of "known safe" high-level primitives, and B. a coupling of education in the craft of AI with education in the engineering of AI.
The "profession" of developing strong, general-purpose AI should basically look like a cross between cryptography and regular old capital-e-Engineering: like crypto, you'd constantly hear important things about "not rolling your own" low-level AI algorithms; and, like Engineering, the point of the job would be making sure the thing you're building is constructed so that it doesn't "exceed tolerances."
The research goals in the field of "friendly AI" are thus twofold:
• work in understanding possible computational models for minds, to understand what sort of tolerances there can be—what knobs and dials and initial conditions each type of mind comes with;
• and work in development of safe high-level primitives for constructing minds.
Both of these are the subjects of active papers. Note that these can both also be described as plain-old "AI research"; they're not just abstract philosophy, these papers are steps toward something people can build. The research within the subfield of "friendly" AI just has different criteria for what makes for a "promising avenue of research", e.g. ignoring black-box solutions because there are no knobs for humans to tweak.
> MIRI ... spearheaded by
MIRI is two things, and it's best to keep them mentally separate. It's a research organization, like Bell Labs—and it's a nonprofit foundation that funnels money into that research organization.
Yudkowsky is the director (head cheerleader) of the nonprofit. He doesn't really touch the research organization. The research org will succeed or fail on its merits (mostly whether it hires good researchers), but the leadership of the nonprofit has not-much to do with that success or failure, any more than AT&T had any impact on the success or failure of Bell Labs. You can believe in the research org known as MIRI even if you actively distrust Yudkowsky.