And I feel like anyone who really has internalized the idea that minds are allowed to fundamentally care about completely different things...
What is questionable is not the possibility of fundamentally different values but that they could accidentally be implemented. What you are suggesting is that some intelligence is able to evolve a vast repertoire of heuristics, acquire vast amounts of knowledge about the universe, dramatically improve its cognitive flexibility and yet never evolve its values but keep its volition at the level of a washing machine. I think this idea is flawed, or at least not sufficiently backed up to take it serious right now. I believe that such an incentive, or any incentive, will have to be deliberately and carefully hardcoded or evolved. Otherwise we are merely talking about grey goo scenarios.
Ben Goertzel:
Robin Hanson:
We all know the problem with deathism: a strong belief that death is almost impossible to avoid, clashing with undesirability of the outcome, leads people to rationalize either the illusory nature of death (afterlife memes), or desirability of death (deathism proper). But of course the claims are separate, and shouldn't influence each other.
Change in values of the future agents, however sudden of gradual, means that the Future (the whole freackin' Future!) won't be optimized according to our values, won't be anywhere as good as it could've been otherwise. It's easier to see a sudden change as morally relevant, and easier to rationalize gradual development as morally "business as usual", but if we look at the end result, the risks of value drift are the same. And it is difficult to make it so that the future is optimized: to stop uncontrolled "evolution" of value (value drift) or recover more of astronomical waste.
Regardless of difficulty of the challenge, it's NOT OK to lose the Future. The loss might prove impossible to avert, but still it's not OK, the value judgment cares not for feasibility of its desire. Let's not succumb to the deathist pattern and lose the battle before it's done. Have the courage and rationality to admit that the loss is real, even if it's too great for mere human emotions to express.