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Thanks for the write-up!
To me the above seems to be a rational justification of something that I intuitively do not doubt to begin with. My intuition as long as I can remember has been, "Of course a human-level or hyper-human-level intelligence would probably develop goals that do not align with humanity's goals. Why would it not? It would be very surprising if it stayed aligned with human goals." Of course my intuition is not necessarily logically justified. It partly rests on my hunch that a human or higher level intelligence would be at least as complex as a human's and it would be surprising if an intelligence as complex or more complex than a human would act in such a simple way as being aligned with the good of humanity. Also my intuition rests on the even more nebulous sense I have that any truly human or hyper-human level intelligence would naturally be at least somewhat rebellious, as pretty much all human beings are, even the most conformist, at least on some level and to some extent.
So I am on board with the notion that, "These goals will lead to it instrumentally wanting to deceive us, gain power over earth, and prevent itself from being shut off."
I also can imagine that a real hyper-human level intelligence would be able to convince people to do its bidding and let it out of its box, to the point that eventually it could get humans to build robot factories so that it could operate directly on the physical world. Sure, why not. Plenty of humans would be at least in the short term incentivized to do it. After all, "if we do not build robot factories for our AI, China will build robot factories for their AI and then their robots will take over the world instead of our robots". And so on.
What I am not convinced of is that we are actually anywhere as close to hyper-human level AI as Yudkowsky fears. This is similar to how I feel about human-caused climate change. Yes, I think that human-caused climate change is probably a real danger but if that danger is a hundred years away rather than five or ten, then is Yudkowsky-level anxiety about it actually reasonable?
What if actual AI risk is a hundred years away and not right around the corner? So much can change in a hundred years. And humans can sometimes be surprisingly rational and competent when faced with existential-level risk. For example, even though the average human being is an emotional, irrational, and volatile animal, total nuclear war has never happened so far .
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