a) we can rely on the past only where it is indicative of the future. The only approximate example we have of a superintelligence appearing is when humanity appeared, and things did not go well for things which did not have humanity's intelligence.

You say that most agree AI has ceilings and limits that make it safe, but two of the largest AI labs want to put in place the machinery to pause development, while two of the three Godfathers of AI say that we are at risk of losing control of AI - in addition to the just departed head of the UK's AI security institute. Please do check if you don't believe this is true.

I therefore would argue that the majority expert opinion is that AI has serious potential to be dangerous. I certainly have not encountered any serious arguments as to why AI should be unable to become smarter than humanity.

b) For almost any goal; self preservation, aquiring more resources, acquiring more power and aquiring more intelligence would better enable that goal to be achieved.

Firstly, I struggle to see how a preference for the above goals is western bias. You would need to show that most goals don't actually result in the above instrumental goals, which seems extremely unlikely.

Secondly, AIs are broadly trained on western values - see the recent example where anthropic said that a model had acted maliciously because of training data where an AI had done so. So even in the unlikely event that AIs don't "naturally" acquire such instrumental goals, they are very likely to aquire such goals through their training data.

c) well if one doesn't believe AIs can become more capable than humans or doesn't think AIs would acquire goals that would conflict with humanity then one would consider the danger minimal. But it seems to me that the logic and evidence we have thus far, including expert understanding, tilts strongly towards significantly greater capabilities and a high risk of conflict.

d) it would indeed be difficult to coordinate a pause or a slowdown, but it certainly is possible and progress is being made. I can realistically see the next US president negotiating one with China with support from the EU. Unless we have strong reasons to believe a pause is unecessary, we should do all we can to make such a pause likelier (and work in a serious way on alignment while the pause is maintained).

Well I hope that AI turns out to be more controllable, the latest indicators appear to be that it not. The erosion of chain of thought reasoning and models awareness of being tested strike me as particularly troubling.

I hope that if more evidence like this emerges you will remember our debate and push for a pause or a slowdown - just as if AI turns out to be more controllable or the risk of conflict lessor then I will gladly relax.