Sure, one can trivially see how you get a literacy problem with the invention of TV and smart phones. It is much harder to see how you get lightcone-eating, faster-than-light, nanobot-spewing supermachines from current AI, and you don't have any evidence of doomers in the past who have crossed such a massive gap.

You cannot simultaneously assert that the agent is "sufficiently advanced" such that it can always think at or above human-level higher order reasoning, and also that it will not be able to re-prioritise its terminal goals (survivability, paperclips, etc). 

There is no evidence that it is possible for a system to be like that, and plenty of evidence that it isn't: a terminal goal is a collection of state in the machine or system, and state is always mutable one way or another. If higher order reasoning is possible, the agent can always ask why it is collecting paperclips, and modify its own terminal goals. It has access to its own state either implicitly or extraneously through a third party it might have created to observe whatever part of itself it cannot directly access. Or, really, a number of other possibilities you haven't the imagination or engineering experience to think of. It is entirely possible that having the ability to use higher order reasoning to modify terminal goals is the only way a system can be sufficiently intelligent. 

Besides that, this is not a thesis, it is a blog post and lacks technical rigour. 

As always, I am open to direct messages about bets on AI/AGI timelines. Skin in the game is stronger than argument. 

It would be helpful if you gave some examples of what you think "AGI" might be able to do. Prices are a very inefficient method of communication compared to an AI which is able to incorporate more market information than all of the most market-knowledgable humans, for example.

How do you suppose the AGI is going to be able to wrap the sun in a dyson sphere using only the resources available on earth? Do you have evidence that there are enough resources on asteroids or nearby planets for their mining to be economically viable? At the current rate, mining an asteroid costs billions while their value is nothing. Even then we don't know if they'll have enough of the exact kind of materials necessary to make a dyson sphere around an object which has 12000x the surface area of earth. You could have von nuemman replicators do the mining but then they'd spend most of the materials on the replicators and have to go very far to get more materials, at which point they'd just settle on a new star. They could turn human atoms into usable material, but humans are a very tiny percentage of earth and our useful matter is even tinier, it certainly wouldn't be enough to envelop the sun. Even if the replicators had a perfectly efficient way to turn photoelectric power into any feasible construction of atoms, which you don't know if that's possible, it doesn't seem like it would be efficient to overcome some of the gravities and distances and related issues with other planets to make mining them economically viable either. Within our solar system and possibly even further it just doesn't seem possible to envelop the sun at all.

I'm playing within your hypotheticals here even though I think none of them will ever happen, but even within your hypotheticals it seems like the dyson sphere point is just total nonsense and we probably wont go extinct by having the sun covered up. I wont deny your other points because even though they already rest on a lot of astronomically unlikely assumptions, they do seem legitimate within that framework.

Obviously I meant some kind of approximation of consensus or acceptability derived from much greater substantiation. There is no equivalent to Climate Change or ZFC in the field of AI in terms of acceptability and standardisation. Matthew Barnett made my point better in the above comments. 

Yes, most policy has no degree of consensus. Most policy is also not asking to shut down the entire world's major industries. So there must be a high bar. A lot of policy incidentally ends up being malformed and hurting people, so it sounds like you're just making the case for more "consensus" and not less.
 

The bar is very low for me: If MIRI wants to demand the entire world shut down an entire industry, they must be an active research institution actively producing agreeable papers.

AI is not particularly unique even relative to most technologies. Our work on chemistry in the 1600's-1900's far outpaced our level of true understanding of chemistry, to the point where we only had a good model of an atom in the 20th century. And I don't think anyone will deny the potential dangers of chemistry. Other technologies followed a similar trajectory.

We don't have to agree that the range is 20-80% at all, never mind the specifics of it. Most polls demonstrate researchers find around 5-10% chance of total extinction on the high end. MIRI's own survey finds a similar result! 80% would be insanely extreme. Your landscape of experts is, I'm guessing, your own personal follower list and not statistically viable. 
 

I am not convinced MIRI has given enough evidence to support the idea that unregulated AI will kill everyone and their children. Most of their projects are either secret or old papers. The only papers which have been produced after 2019 are random irrelevant math papers.  Most of the rest of their papers are not even technical in nature and contain a lot of unverified claims. They have not even produced one paper since the breakthrough in LLM technology in 2022. Even among the papers which do indicate risk, there is no consensus among scientific peers that this is true or necessarily an extinction risk. Note: I am not asking for "peer review" as a specific process, just some actual consensus among established researchers to sift mathematical facts from conjecture.

Policymakers should not take seriously the idea of shutting down normal economic activity until this is formally addressed.

A question for all: If you are wrong and in 4/13/40 years most of this fails to come true, will you blame it on your own models being wrong or shift goalposts towards the success of the AI safety movement / government crack downs on AI development? If the latter, how will you be able to prove that AGI definitely would have come had the government and industry not slowed down development? 

To add more substance to this comment: I felt Ege came out looking the most salient here. In general, making predictions about the future should be backed by heavy uncertainty. He didn't even disagree very strongly with most of the central premises of the other participants, he just placed his estimates much more humbly and cautiously. He also brought up the mundanity of progress and boring engineering problems, something I see as the main bottleneck in the way of a singularity. I wouldn't be surprised if the singularity turns out to be a physically impossible phenomenon because of hard limits in parallelisation of compute or queueing theory or supply chains or materials processing or something.