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I think you're right about the cringe, bad arguments, and false dichotomies. But unfortunately I do think there are strong arguments that humans will ultimately be marginalized once we're no longer the smartest, most capable type of thing on earth. Think the Trail of Tears, or all of humanity being a naive grandma on the internet - it's only a matter of time before we're disempowered or swindled out of whatever resources we have. And all economic and power incentives will point towards marginalizing us, just like wildlife is marginalized or crushed as cities grow.
Internet atheists were all the things that AI doomers are today, and they're both right, imo.
I think our only choices are basically either to uplift ourselves (but we don't know how yet) or, like a grandma, take a chance on delegating our wishes to a more sophisticated agent. So I'm inclined to try to buy time, even if it substantially increases our chances of getting stuck with totalitarianism.
That depends on the definition of human.
No, I believe in the will to power. The successor species will more likely diverge from the present stock than be enfranchised despite its tool origins.
That was and is done by humans to humans, naturally.
Good example. I'd advise @self_made_human to consider the efforts Europeans expend to save some random toads or deer or whatever with tunnels and road overpasses. Yet those species are often at low single-digit percentages of their historical numbers. Letting the current population of baseline humans live, and even live decently, is not so cheap when there's solar-system-scale engineering going around; it requires obnoxious logistics, and at the first stages it will consume a non-negligible share of available energy and matter.
My claim here is that I do not trust human (or posthuman) masters of the realm to be even as generous to powerless humans as we are to wildlife today. They will have no reason to be that generous.
AI, however, is not necessarily reasonable. Not all AIs are agents playing the Darwinian game.
Well if you're OK with the successor species taking over even if it's non-human, then I guess we're at an impasse. I think that's better than nothing, but way worse than humanity thriving.
I see what you mean about the possibility of a generous AI being more likely if it's not subject to competition. But I buy the argument that, no matter what it cares about, due to competing concerns, it probably won't be all that generous to us unless that's basically the only thing it cares about.
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