All human opinions cannot be created by persuasion alone because opinions have to start somewhere. People can and do think for themselves and that's what creates opinions.
This is completely wrong. Again, you give "persuasion" a very narrow scope.
A baby is born without language, certainly without many opinions. It can be shaped by its environment ("persuasion") to be almost anything. Certainly, very few of the extremely diverse cultures and sub-cultures known from history have had any trouble raising their kids to behave like the adults, with only a small typical proportion of adolescents who left for another society. And these people had no understanding of how the brain really works - unlike what a superintelligent AI might have.
Short version: it doesn't matter if people do think for themselves, because they only get to think about their sensory inputs and the AI can control those. Even a perfect Bayesian superintelligence would reach any conclusion you wished if you truly fully controlled all the information it ever received (as long as it had no priors of 0 or 1).
This entire site is based around getting people to not be arbitrarily malleable and to require rationality in making decisions [...] Is this site and community a failure then?
If you end up in an environment controlled by an unfriendly AI, having read this site won't help you; it's game over. LW rationality skills work in some worlds, not in any possible world.
Regarding actions that cause outrage I never said you were constrained by the outrage of others. I said an AI that maximizes human well-being is not going to take actions that cause extreme outrage.
How is this different from saying it's not going to let me take actions that cause extreme outrage? I hope you aren't planning on building an AI that has a sense of personal responsibility and doesn't care if humans subvert its utility function as long as it didn't cause them to do so.
There is a profound difference between being persuasive and manipulating all sensory input of a human. Is your argument not that it would try to persuade but that an AI would hook up all humans to a computer that controlled everything we perceived? If you want to make that your argument, I'm game for discussing it, but I think it should be made clear that this is a very different argument than an AI trying to change people's minds through persuasion. But lets discuss it. This suggestion of manipulating the senses of humans seems to imply a massive use of t...
I put "trivial" in quotes because there are obviously some exceptionally large technical achievements that would still need to occur to get here, but suppose we had an AI with a utilitarian utility function of maximizing subjective human well-being (meaning, well-being is not something as simple as physical sensation of "pleasure" and depends on the mental facts of each person) and let us also assume the AI can model this "well" (lets say at least as well as the best of us can deduce the values of another person for their well-being). Finally, we will also assume that the AI does not possess the ability to manually rewire the human brain to change what a human values. In other words, the ability for the AI to manipulate another person's values is limited by what we as humans are capable of today. Given all this, is there any concern we should have about making this AI; would it succeed in being a friendly AI?
One argument I can imagine for why this fails friendly AI is the AI would wire people up to virtual reality machines. However, I don't think that works very well, because a person (except Cypher from the Matrix) wouldn't appreciate being wired into a virtual reality machine and having their autonomy forcefully removed. This means the action does not succeed in maximizing their well-being.
But I am curious to hear what arguments exist for why such an AI might still fail as a friendly AI.