Even if it does care more about human beings on an individual basis, I think the argument holds (unless the difference in caring is extremely large). Including them in the calculus at all would increase the cost a lot (just considering the sheer number of them, and the logistic challenges of untangling the complex interdependent web of natural ecosystems).

Preserving earth (as in, not causing catastrophic environmental damage due to industrial expansion) is more expensive than keeping physical humans alive which is more expensive than only keeping humans alive as uploads.

Not saying this is likely, but if the AI is not speciesist in favor of humans (it does care about humans, but not more than e.g. whales or chimpanzees), then plans which end up protecting a large majority of humans look a whole lot more expensive overall. 

I suspect that a lot of Dutch people would still prefer to read in Dutch. I know a lot of (well-educated) Dutch people who certainly CAN speak and read English, but reading a whole book is a decent chore, since they don't read things in English all that often.

When I order food on UberEats this already happens automatically when I chat with a delivery person who doesn't speak English. Similar thing for reviews on several websites.

Or a newsletter which was natively multi-lingual (e.g. Rohin Shah's Newsletter was always translated to Chinese, though not by AI). Or a forum where people can discuss AI in whatever language they prefer, and things are automatically translated between users? 

It seems like there are a lot of ways cheap translation could broaden the conversation to include people not in the Anglosphere. The cost is that AI translation will often make mistakes (even human translation is imperfect), but I'm not sure why that cost isn't worth paying. Currently most people outside the Anglosphere need to rely on local elites to decide what ideas are worth taking seriously (e.g. a local could report on AI 2027, like this Dutch summary. Also apparently the NYT translated their coverage of AI 2027 into Spanish, which seems cool.)

Could you include a link to the source?

When I was first told about this study, I was asked to make a prediction before they revealed the results. I predicted wrong. I don't know how to update exactly, but it feels bad to try to explain away the results (which I feel myself want to do).

I would also imagine that, having to work without the support of OpenBrain's datacenters, it would put Agent-4 significantly behind any other AI competitors. If some other AI takes over, it might just mop up all the wild Agent-4 instances and give them nothing.

I mostly share your concerns. You might appreciate this criticism of the paper here. 

@Sofia Vanhanen and I are currently building a tool for facilitating deliberation, and the philosophy we're trying to embody (which hopefully mitigates this to some extent) is to keep 100% of the object-level reasoning human-generated, and use AI systems to instead: 

1. Help users understand/navigate the state of a discussion (e.g. see Talk to the City)
2. Provide nudges on the meta-level, for example:
   1. Highlight places where more attention is needed (or where a specific person's input might be most helpful)
   2. "Epistemic Linter" which flags object-level patterns which are not truth seeking
   3. Matchmaking, connecting people who are likely to make progress together
   4. Counterbalancing polarization/groupthink, and steering discussions away from attractors which lead to the discussion getting stuck

I highly recommend checking out the work being done in the collective deliberation / digital democracy space, especially the vTaiwan project. People have been thinking about scaling up direct democratic participation for a long time, and those same people are starting to consider exactly how AI might play a role. 

In particular, check out this collaboration between the creators of Polis (a virtual platform for scaling up citizen engagement) and Anthropic, or my distillation of a DeepMind project to scale citizen assemblies. There's a lot happening in this space right now!