Those all sound line fairly normal beliefs.

Like... I'm trying to figure out why the title of the post is "I am not a successionist" and not "like many other utilitarians I have a preference for people who are biologically similar to me, I have things in common with, or I am close friends with.  I believe when optimizing utility in the far future we should take these things into account"

Even though can't comment on OP's views,  you seemed to have a strong objection to my "we're merely talking price" statement (i.e. when calculating total utility we consider tradeoffs between different things we care about).  


Edit:

to put it another way, if I wrote a post titled "I am a successionist" in which I said something like: "I want my children to have happy lives and their children to have happy lives, and I believe they can define 'children' in whatever way seems best to them", how would my views actually different from yours (or the OPs)?

I genuinely  want to know what you mean by "kind".

If your grandchildren adopt an extremely genetically distant human, is that okay?  A highly intelligent, social and biologically compatible alien?

You've said you're fine with simulations here, so it's really unclear.

I used "markov blanket" to describe what I thought you might be talking about: a continuous voluntary process characterized by you and your decedents making free choices about their future.  But it seems like you're saying "markov blanket bad", and moreover that you thought the distinction should have be obvious to me.

Even if there isn't a bright-line definition, there must be some cluster of traits/attributes you are associating with the word "kind".

alas, this isn't really enforceable in the USA given the 1st amendment.

but we eventually die. 
 

Dying is a symmetric problem, it's not like we can't die without AGI. If you want to calculate p(human extinction | AGI) you have to consider ways AGI can both increase and decrease p(extinction).  And the best methods currently available to humans to aggregate low probability statistics are expert surveys, groups of super-forecasters, or prediction markets, all of which agree on pDoom <20%.

this experiment has been done before.

If you have a framing of the AI Doom argument that can cause a consensus of super-forecasters (or AI risk skeptics, or literally any group that has an average pDoom<20%) to change their consensus, I would be exceptionally interested in seeing that demonstrated.

Such an argument would be neither bad nor weak, which is precisely the type of argument I have been hoping to find by writing this post.

> Please notice that your position is extremely non-intuitive to basically everyone. 

Please notice that Manifold both thinks AGI soon and pDoom low.

I think this cumulative argument works:

1. there are dozens of ways AI can prevent a mass extinction event at different stages at its existence.

2. ...

If you make a list of 1000 bad things and I make a list of 1000 good things, I have no reason to think that you are somehow better at making lists than prediction markets or expert surveys.

Are you genuinely unfamiliar with what is happening to the uyghurs, or is this a rhetorical question?

Why do I expect the trend to be superexponential? Well, it seems like it sorta has to go superexponential eventually. Imagine: We've got to AIs that can with ~100% reliability do tasks that take professional humans 10 years. But somehow they can't do tasks that take professional humans 160 years?

I don't think this means the real thing has to go hyper-exponential, just that "how long does it take humans to do a thing?" is a good metric when AI is sub-human but a poor one when AI is superhuman.

If we had a metric "how many seconds/turn does a grandmaster have to think to beat the current best chess-playing AI", it would go up at a nice steady rate until shortly after DeepBlue at which point it shoots to infinity.  But if we had a true measurement of chess quality, we wouldn't see any significant spike at the human-level.

I’ll now present the fastest scenario for AI progress that I can articulate with a straight face. It addresses the potential challenges that figured into my slow scenario.

This seems incredibly slow for "the fastest scenario you can articulate".  Surely the fastest is more like:

EY is right, there is an incredibly simple algorithm that describes true 'intelligence'.  Like humans, this algorithm is 1000x more data and compute efficient than existing deep-learning networks.  On midnight of day X, this algorithm is discovered by <a person/an LLM/an exhaustive search over all possible algorithms>.  By 0200 of day X, the algorithm has reached the intelligence of a human being.  It quickly snowballs by earning money on Mechanical Turk and using that money to rent out GPUs on AWS.  By 0400 the algorithm has cracked nanotechnology and begins converting life into computronium.  Several minutes later, life as we know it on Earth has ceased to exist.