We humans dominate the globe but we don’t disassemble literally everything (although we do a lot) to use the atoms for other purposes.
There are two reasons why we don’t:
We don’t have the resources or technology to. For example there are tons of metals in the ground and up in space that we’d love to get our hands on but don’t yet have the tech or the time to do so, and there are viruses we’d love to destroy but we don’t know how. The AGI is presumably much more capable than us, and it hardly even needs to be more capable than us to destroy us (the tech and resources for that already exist), so this reason will not stop it.
We don’t want to. For example there are some forests we could turn into useful wood and farmland, and yet we protect them for reasons such as “beauty”, “caring for the environment”, etc. Thing is, these are all very human-specific reasons, and:
Isn’t it arguable that ASI or even AGI will have a better appreciation for systems ecology than we do…
No. Sure it is possible, as in it doesn’t have literally zero chance if you draw a mind at random. (Similarly a rocket launched in a random direction could potentially land on the moon, or at least crash into it.) But there are so many possible things an AGI could be optimizing for, and there is no reason that human-centric things like “systems ecology” should be likely, as opposed to “number of paperclips”, “number of alternating 1s and 0s in its memory banks”, or an enormous host of things we can’t even comprehend because we haven’t discovered the relevant physics yet.
(My personal hope for humanity lies in the first bullet point above being wrong: given surprising innovations in the past, it seems plausible that someone will solve alignment before it’s too late, and also given some semi-successful global coordination things in the past (avoiding nuclear war, banning CFCs), it seems plausible that a few scary pre-critical AIs might successfully galvanize the world into successful delaying action for long enough that alignment could be solved)
There are two reasons why we don’t:
We don’t have the resources or technology to. For example there are tons of metals in the ground and up in space that we’d love to get our hands on but don’t yet have the tech or the time to do so, and there are viruses we’d love to destroy but we don’t know how. The AGI is presumably much more capable than us, and it hardly even needs to be more capable than us to destroy us (the tech and resources for that already exist), so this reason will not stop it.
We don’t want to. For example there are some forests we could turn into useful wood and farmland, and yet we protect them for reasons such as “beauty”, “caring for the environment”, etc. Thing is, these are all very human-specific reasons, and:
No. Sure it is possible, as in it doesn’t have literally zero chance if you draw a mind at random. (Similarly a rocket launched in a random direction could potentially land on the moon, or at least crash into it.) But there are so many possible things an AGI could be optimizing for, and there is no reason that human-centric things like “systems ecology” should be likely, as opposed to “number of paperclips”, “number of alternating 1s and 0s in its memory banks”, or an enormous host of things we can’t even comprehend because we haven’t discovered the relevant physics yet.
(My personal hope for humanity lies in the first bullet point above being wrong: given surprising innovations in the past, it seems plausible that someone will solve alignment before it’s too late, and also given some semi-successful global coordination things in the past (avoiding nuclear war, banning CFCs), it seems plausible that a few scary pre-critical AIs might successfully galvanize the world into successful delaying action for long enough that alignment could be solved)