1. Other planets have more mass, higher insolation, lower gravity, lower temperature and/or rings and more (mass in) moons. I can think of reasons why any of those might be more or less desirable than the characteristics of Earth It is also possible that the AI may determine it is better off not to be on a planet at all. In addition, in a non- foom scenario, for defensive or conflict avoidance reasons the AI may wind up leaving Earth and once it does so may choose not to return.

2. That depends a lot on how it views the probe. In particular by doing this is it setting up a more dangerous competitor than humanity or not? Does it regard the probe as self? Has it solved the alignment problem and how good does it think it's solution is?

3. No. Humans aren't going to be the best solution. The question is whether they will be good enough that it would be a better use of resources to continue using the humans and focus on other issues.

4. It's definitely possible that it will discover extra reasons to process Earth (or destroy the humans even if it doesn't process Earth).

This is just wrong.  Avoiding processing Earth doesn't require that the AI cares for us.  Other possibilities include:

(1)  Earth is not worth it; the AI determines that getting off Earth fast is better;

(2)  AI determines that it is unsure that it can process Earth without unacceptable risk to itself;

(3) AI determines that humans are actually useful to it one way or another;

(4)  Other possibilities that a super-intelligent AI can think of, that we can't.

There are, of necessity, a fair number of assumptions in the arguments he makes.   Similarly, counter-arguments to his views also make a fair number of assumptions.  Given that we are talking about something that has never happened and which could happen in a number of different ways, this is inevitable. 

What makes monkeys intelligent in your view?  

This is an interesting question on which I've gone back and forth.  I think ultimately, the inability to recognize blatant inconsistencies or to reason at all means that LLMs so far are not intelligent. (Or at least not more intelligent than a parrot.)

Bing Chat is not intelligent.   It doesn't really have a character.  (And whether one calls it GPT-4 or not, given the number of post-GPT changes doesn't seem very meaningful.)

But to the extent that people think that one or more of the above things are true however, it will tend to increase skepticism of AI and support for taking more care in deploying it and for regulating it, all of which seem positive. 

"An exception is made for jobs that fail to reach their employment due to some clearly identifiable non-software-related shock or change in trends, such as an economic crisis or a war. Such jobs will be removed from the list before computing the fraction."

But macroeconomic or geopolitical events such as major recession or war are likely to affect all job categories.   So the correct way to deal with this is not to remove such jobs but to adjust the fraction by the change in overall employment. 

There already exist communication mechanisms more nuanced than signing a petition.  You can call or write/email your legislator with more nuanced views. The barrier is not the effort to communicate (which under this proposal might be slightly lower) but the effort to evaluate the issue and come up with a nuanced position.

If the risk from AGI is significant (and whether you think p(doom) is 1% or 10% or 100% is it unequivocally significant) and imminent (and whether your timelines are 3 years or 30 years it is pretty imminent) the problem is that an institution as small as MIRI is a significant part of the efforts to mitigate this risk, not whether or not MIRI gave up.   

(I recognize that some of the interest in MIRI is the result of having a relatively small community of people focused on the AGI x-risk problem and the early prominence in that community of a couple of individuals, but that really is just a restatement of the problem).

I appreciate that you have defined what you mean when you say AGI.  One problem with a lot of timeline work, especially now, is that AGI is not always defined.