I guess if I had to boil the problem down to a thought, it would be this: the effort required to build a system capable of interpreting the nuance of language w

I guess if I had to boil the problem down to a thought, it would be this: the effort required to build a system capable of interpreting the nuance of language would be as much or more than building a system capable of generating and implementing its own ideas. Once you have a sufficiently powerful AI, you don't even need to tell it to do anything; it should just do it based off sensor data. If, for security reasons, you wanted to shackle an AI from making and acting on its own choices, you would need to shackle its ability to interpret language as well because they are the same thing. You have to make choices about implied intent when interpreting language; and those choices. You can't just restrict a machine to making choices on linguistic interpretations if those interpretations then lead directly to action (in the case of natural language programming). We can (and have) created sets of natural language interpreters for specific situations: Siri is a good example of that. But by and large these are hacks that flag specific situations (such as creating a reminder or opening an app) and pick out the relevant phrases and plug data into fields.