For the first AGI to be the only AGI, all other AGI development would have to cease without such "niche AGIs" ever being created.
That AGI does not need to stay the only one to solidly stay in power. Since it has been playing the game for longer, it would be reasonable for it to be able to keep tabs on other intelligent entities, and only interfere with their development if they became too powerful. You can still have other entities doing their own thing, there just has to be a predictable ceiling on how much power they can acquire - indeed, that is the idea behind FAI programming: Have the FAI solve some fundamental problems of society, but still leave a society composed of plenty of other intelligences.
This would be made easier if reality is virtualized (i.e. if the singleton AI handles building and maintaining computronium infrastructure, and the rest of society runs as programs using some of the resources it provides); you don't need to monitor every piece of matter for what computations it might carry out, if you've limited how much computation power you give to specific entities, and prevented them from direct write access to physical reality, to begin with.
In the end, I think eventual decisive strategic advantage for a single AI is extremely likely; it's certainly a stable solution, it might happen due to initial timing, and even if doesn't happen right then, it can still happen later. It's far from clear any other arrangement would be similarly stable over the extremely long time horizons of relevance here (which are the same as those for continued existence of intelligences derived from our civilization; in the presence of superintelligent AGIs, likely billions of years). In fact, the most likely alternative to me is that humanity falls into some other existential catastrophe that prevents us from developing AGI at all.
This is part of a weekly reading group on Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence. For more information about the group, and an index of posts so far see the announcement post. For the schedule of future topics, see MIRI's reading guide.
Welcome. This week we discuss the seventh section in the reading guide: Decisive strategic advantage. This corresponds to Chapter 5.
This post summarizes the section, and offers a few relevant notes, and ideas for further investigation. Some of my own thoughts and questions for discussion are in the comments.
There is no need to proceed in order through this post, or to look at everything. Feel free to jump straight to the discussion. Where applicable and I remember, page numbers indicate the rough part of the chapter that is most related (not necessarily that the chapter is being cited for the specific claim).
Reading: Chapter 5 (p78-91)
Summary
5. Disagreement. Note that though few people believe that a single AI project will get to dictate the future, this is often because they disagree with things in the previous chapter - e.g. that a single AI project will plausibly become more capable than the world in the space of less than a month.
If you are particularly interested in these topics, and want to do further research, these are a few plausible directions, some inspired by Luke Muehlhauser's list, which contains many suggestions related to parts of Superintelligence. These projects could be attempted at various levels of depth.
How to proceed
This has been a collection of notes on the chapter. The most important part of the reading group though is discussion, which is in the comments section. I pose some questions for you there, and I invite you to add your own. Please remember that this group contains a variety of levels of expertise: if a line of discussion seems too basic or too incomprehensible, look around for one that suits you better!
Next week, we will talk about Cognitive superpowers (section 8). To prepare, read Chapter 6. The discussion will go live at 6pm Pacific time next Monday 3 November. Sign up to be notified here.