The concept of "the meaning of life" still seems like a category error to me. It's an attempt to apply a system of categorization used for tools, one in which they are categorized by the purpose for which they are used, to something that isn't a tool: a human life. It's a holdover from theistic worldviews in which God created humans for some unknown purpose.

The lesson I draw instead from the knowledge-uploading thought experiment -- where having knowledge instantly zapped into your head seems less worthwhile acquiring it more slowly yourself -- is that to some extent, human values simply are masochistic. Hedonic maximization is not what most people want, even with all else being equal. This goes beyond simply valuing the pride of accomplishing difficult tasks, as such as the sense of accomplishment one would get from studying on one's own, above other forms of pleasure. In the setting of this thought experiment, if you wanted the sense of accomplishment, you could get that zapped into your brain too, but much like getting knowledge zapped into your brain instead of studying yourself, automatically getting a sense of accomplishment would be of lesser value. The suffering of studying for yourself is part of what makes us evaluate it as worthwhile.

Spoilers for Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood:

Mostly the first reason. The "made of atoms that can be used for something else" piece of the standard AI x-risk argument also applies to suffering conscious beings, so an AI would be unlikely to keep them around if the standard AI x-risk argument ends up being true.

It's worth noting that no reference to preferences has yet been made. That's interesting because it suggests that there are both 0P-preferences and 1P-preferences. That intuitively makes sense, since I do care about both the actual state of the world, and what kind of experiences I'm having.

Believing in 0P-preferences seems to be a map-territory confusion, an instance of the Tyranny of the Intentional Object. The robot can't observe the grid in a way that isn't mediated by its sensors. There's no way for 0P-statements to enter into the robot's decision loop, and accordingly act as something the robot can have preferences over, except by routing through 1P-statements. Instead of directly having a 0P-preference for "a square of the grid is red," the robot would have to have a 1P-preference for "I believe that a square of the grid is red." 

What's your model of inflation in an AI takeoff scenario? I don't know enough about macroeconomics to have a good model of what AI takeoff would do to inflation, but it seems like it would do something.

You're underestimating how hard it is to fire people from government jobs, especially when those jobs are unionized. And even if there are strong economic incentives to replace teachers with AI, that still doesn't address the ease of circumvention. There's no surer way to make teenagers interested in a topic than to tell them that learning about it is forbidden.

All official teaching materials would be generated by a similar process. At about the same time, the teaching profession as we know it today ceases to exist. "Teachers" become merely administrators of the teaching system. No original documents from before AI are permitted for children to access in school.

This sequence of steps looks implausible to me. Teachers would have a vested interest in preventing it, since their jobs would be on the line. A requirement for all teaching materials to be AI-generated would also be trivially easy to circumvent, either by teachers or by the students themselves. Any administrator who tried to do these things would simply have their orders ignored, and the Streisand Effect would lead to a surge of interest in pre-AI documents among both teachers and students.

Why do you ordinarily not allow discussion of Buddhism on your posts?

Also, if anyone reading this does a naturalist study on a concept from Buddhist philosophy, I'd like to hear how it goes.

An edgy writing style is an epistemic red flag. A writing style designed to provoke a strong, usually negative, emotional response from the reader can be used to disguise the thinness of the substance behind the author's arguments. Instead of carefully considering and evaluating the author's arguments, the reader gets distracted by the disruption to their emotional state and reacts to the text in a way that more closely resembles a trauma response, with all the negative effects on their reasoning capabilities that such a response entails. Some examples of authors who do this: Friedrich Nietzsche, Grant Morrison, and The Last Psychiatrist.

OK, so maybe this is a cool new way to look at at certain aspects of GPT ontology... but why this primordial ontological role for the penis?

"Penis" probably has more synonyms than any other term in GPT-J's training data.