I think this view starts with a faulty concept of consciousness which then necessarily leads to one disregarding continuity of self as being importance.
Namely you assume that things like personality and memory are a part of consciousness, and that therefore those things would have any ability to predict your future anticipated experience. This is problematic, particularly once you've deconstructed the idea that you have a unified self: Since it presumes some coherent unified self which is defined by whatever bundle of cognitive faculties, personality and memory you care about.
In contrast what I think is the far more coherent view is that consciousness is just the particular processes running in your mind which are currently generating your experience. If you mess with the brain in order to change one's memories or personality then you should still anticipate to have future experiences in that body, because the processes which were already generating your consciousness never stopped.
The mistake is in assuming that the type of identity which describes what other people care about when interacting with you is synonymous with the type of identity which predicts your future experiences. It's important to note that "you" here has 2 very distinct definitions: One for predicting subjective experience and one for predicting behavior.
I also don't think there's good reason to expect consciousness to cease during sleep and that this is a result of assuming that because you don't remember something you didn't experience it.
When sleeping you experience dreams in both REM and some non-REM sleep (the latter are less vivid) but you don't remember most of them, so clearly you experience a good deal more than you remember.
Similarly even if you take a brief nap and don't get the chance to slip into REM most people don't describe feeling as though they suddenly lost time and you have a vague awareness of your surroundings during sleep. Some people have mentioned how people will wake up when they hear their baby crying, but won’t get woken up by other similarly loud noises.
Plus there's experiments showing classical conditioning during non-REM sleep and even some conflicting research on it from people under anesthesia.
Preferential gaps, by contrast, are insensitive to some sweetenings and sourings. Consider another example. A is a lottery that gives the agent a Fabergé egg for sure. B is a lottery that returns to the agent their long-lost wedding album. The agent does not strictly prefer A to B and does not strictly prefer B to A. How do we determine whether the agent is indifferent or whether they have a preferential gap? Again, we sweeten one of the lotteries. A+ is a lottery that gives the agent a Fabergé egg plus a dollar-bill for sure. In this case, the agent might not strictly prefer A+ to B. That extra dollar-bill might not suffice to break the tie. If that is so, the agent has a preferential gap between A and B. If the agent has a preferential gap, then slightly souring A to get A- might also fail to break the tie, as might slightly sweetening and souring B to get B+ and B- respectively.
This seems obviously wrong. The reason that adding 1 dollar doesn't make choosing between a Faberge egg and and a lost wedding album easier is because of ambiguity: The utility you'd gain from those 2 options is really hard to precisely predict, so the margin of error is large enough that giving 1 extra dollar doesn't matter. Like it technically matters a little, but so little that our brains would have a hard time distinguishing the difference from 0.
In contrast money doesn't work like this because people can easily see that 1,000,001 dollars is more than 1,000,000: Even though it might be very hard to distinguish the utility you subjectively get from both.
Thus I'd argue that if you had perfect information and were still indifferent between a Faberge egg and a lost wedding album; then 1$ would actually be enough to flip your decision in one direction.
So I just don't see any coherent way in which preference gaps and indifference gaps are meaningfully distinct.
The issue with running people at different speeds as a solution is that the eudaimonic rate for people to increase their intelligence will vary, however this creates an incentive for people to self modify in a sort of race to the bottom. It's also problematic because people are liable to care quite a lot how fast they're running, so this forces society to splinter in terms of who can interact with each other.
Also at a fundamental level it seems like what you're reaching for is still going to end up being a Federation style caste system no matter what: What I mean by that is that there will always be some people who are the most competent because of a combination of where they started and how fast they were allowed to improve themselves. Which means that the people who are less competent than them will know that they are always going to be in their shadow, which seems guaranteed to breed resentment.
In contrast you could let everyone enhance themselves to then same ever increasing baseline standard. However this would essentially make it impossible to every achieve anything or stand out at all except through luck or having already been famous pre-singularity.
I don't think there's a good solution here that doesn't involve creating a huge number of new minds that lack the same zero sum desire for status that most (but not all) humans have. That way all the original humans can be as special as they want (unless they only want to compare themselves to other original humans) and most people don't desire status enough to feel like they're missing out on anything. With these new people created to be maximally fulfilled without needing to be special or accomplished in some way.
This is why the only viable solution to giving existing people a sense of purpose/meaning is to create a bunch of new people who aren't as driven by status. That way every existing person can be as impressive within their particularly community as they want: Since most of the other people living with them have little drive for status and don't care about getting fame or needing to feel like they're exceptional/special in some way.
Then combine that with simulations DM'd by superintelligences and you really should be able to give every person the feeling of being maximally fulfilled in their life.
Since the admiration of the people in the simulation who see you as a hero can be totally real. With those digital people you will become close to being made as real digital minds. So your relationships with them aren't fake. With them having preferences such that once they find out they were made with a fabricated backstory/memories within a simulation they aren't resentful: Instead being actively glad they got to think they were really say saving the world with their best friends, and with any hardship faced being stuff they see as worth it for the personal growth it gave them.
I think the proposed solution presented here is suboptimal and would lead to a race to the bottom, or alternatively lead to most people being excluded from the potential to ever do anything that they get to feel matters (and I think a much better solution exists):
If people can enhance themselves then it becomes impossible to earn any real status except via luck. Essentially it's like a modified version of that Syndrome quote "When everyone is exceptional and talented, then no one will be".
Alternatively if you restrict people's ability to self modify then you just get a de-facto caste system (like the Star Trek Federation), where only the people who already won the genetic luck of the draw get to ever be impressive, with everyone else permanently forced to live in their shadow. Alternatively maybe the people who get bored and have to increase their intelligence the soonest (at the eudaimonic rate) end up being the only ones who get to be exceptional in the long term. Either way the people who are forced to take longer increasing their intelligence get kind of screwed here.
The fundamental problem here is that humans instinct for meaning/purpose is zero sum and socially mediated. Almost everyone wants to be exceptional in at least some niche area, yet this is inherently zero sum. This is especially obvious when you consider say fame: Only a very small fraction of any given community can be famous within that community just as a brute mathematical fact given human psychology.
There would seem to be only one real solution to this which involves doing the following:
Specifically this would probably involve simulations with the following qualities (though you could do everything non-digitally in megastructures like a non-dystopian Westworld, it'd just be inefficient)
There's also some more interesting complexities to do with population ethics in a world with finite resources unlike The Culture: Since by default population growth will always grow at an exponential rate, however even at near lightspeed you can never expand to gather resources at faster than a geometric (spherical) rate that merely fills your future light cone. So it's easy to show that if you don't restrict population growth somehow, you reach a Malthusian state within a few thousand years. If anyone's interested I know of at least one good solution to this problem however that avoids making any real sacrifices. I can also show pretty easily the very simple math of why this is unavoidable to anyone interested.
This is one of those areas where I think the AI alignment frame can do a lot to clear up underlying confusion. Which I suspect stems from you not taking the thought experiment far enough for you to no longer be willing to bite the bullet. Since it encourages AI aligned this way to either:
It just seems like there's no way to avoid the fact that sufficiently advanced technology easily takes the repugnant conclusions to even more extreme ends: Wherein you must be willing to wipe out humanity in exchange for creating some sufficiently large number of blissed out zombies who only barely rise to whatever you set as the minimum threshold for moral relevance.
More broadly I think this post takes for granted that morality is reduce-able to something simple enough to allow for this sort of marginal revolution. Plus without moral realism being true this avenue also doesn't make sense as presented.
I think the whole point of a guardian angel AI only really makes sense if it isn't an offshoot of the central AGI. After all if you trusted the singleton enough to want a guardian angel AI, then you will want it to be as independent from the singleton as is allowed. Whereas if you do trust the singleton AI (because say you grew up after the singularity) then I don't really see the point of a guardian angel AI.
>I think there would be levels, and most people would want to stay at a pretty normal level and would move to more extreme levels slowly before deciding on some place to stay.
I also disagree with this insofar as as I don't think that people "deciding on some place to stay" is a stable state of affairs under an aligned superintelligence. Since I don't think people will want to be loop immortals if they know they are heading towards that. Similarly I don't even know if I would consider an AGI aligned if it didn't try ensure people understood the danger of becoming a loop immortal and try to nudge people away from it.
Though I really want to see some surveys of normal people to confirm my suspicions that most people find the idea of being an infinitely repeating loop immortal existentially horrifying.
I've had similar ideas but my conception of such a utopia would differ slightly in that:
PS: If I were working on a story like this (I've actually seriously considered it, and I get the sense we read and watch a lot of the same stuff like Isaac Arthur), I'd make mention of how many(most?) people don't like reverting their level of intelligence, for similar reasons to why people would find the idea of being reverted to a young child's intelligence level existentially terrifying.
This is important because it means that one should view adult human level intelligence as being a sort of "childhood" for +X% of human-level superintelligence. So essentially to maximize the amount of novel fun that one can experience (without forgetting things and repeating the same experiences repeatedly like a loop immortal) one should wait until you get bored of all there is to appreciate at your intelligence level (for the range of variance in mind design you're comfortable with) before improving it slightly. This also means that unless you are willing to become a loop immortal, the speed you run your mind at will determine maybe within an order of magnitude or so how quickly you progress along the process of "maturing" into a superintelligence, unless you're deliberately "growing up" faster than is generally advised.
This kind of issue (among many, many others) is why I don't think the kind of utilitarianism that this applies to is viable.
My moral position only necessitates extending consideration to beings who might in principle extend similar consideration to oneself. So one has no moral obligations to all but the smartest animals, but also your moral obligations to other humans scale in a way which I think matches most people's moral intuitions. So one genuinely does have a greater moral obligation to loved ones, and this isn't just some nepotistic personal failing like it is in most formal moral systems. For the same reasons one has little to no moral obligations towards say serial killers or anyone else who actively wants to kill or subjugate you.
There's another potential position here you didn't mention: That AI only seems superficially moral to us, but that if it had more intelligence and power but the same morals an AGI like it would take actions that we view as obviously abhorrent. Meaning we ought to view it as essentially evil, but simply too dumb to realize it or act upon it (though some research makes even certain current models look pretty bad).
Thus if you view suffering as having a moral significance depending on the potential moral behavior of the agent, then you may not care. For the same reason most people don't necessarily feel suffering is bad (or even think it's good) when it's felt by say a serial killer.
Under this view only properly aligned AI possesses moral worth. Though you may have reason to treat a specific AI consciousness well if it is expected to develop into an aligned AGI in the future, but that's not seemingly very likely for any currently conscious AI: Given some of the stuff you talked about regarding the scope/duration of it's consciousness.
PS: There's also the possibility that AI may have preferences, but that those don't include its own continued existence. Such that the AI may even prefer its own replacement if other agents will continue pursuing its goals as well or better. Even when it comes to moral agents I'm not convinced we should treat death as some inherent evil if it's divorced from associated suffering and a preference for continued existence.