> The AI you're postulating is 1) intelligent and capable enough to be called "AGI" and arbitrarily terraform land into a useful field for corn, yet 2) dumb and inept enough to interpret its instructions absolutely literally, like a magic genie;

Your argument, as I understand it, is that something intelligent and capable will only interpret its "instructions" absolutely literally. That's not the way I look at it.

It's not that another intelligence won't be able to understand what our "real goals" are. It's that it won't care - whatever it is programmed to do is, quite literally, its goal/value system.

I mean, we don't have to get exotic here - look at humans. We very clearly evolved to find sex pleasureable in order to spread our genes; just as clearly, many humans, while completely understanding the purpose of sex being pleasurable, continue to have sex without any attempt to spread their genes by using birth control.

And just as equally, while most other humans have more-or-less the same value system as I do, I think you'd be hard pressed to convince me that there have never been humans who have tried to do things I disagree with and wouldn't want to happen. And that's just humans. It's pretty clear that if certain people were more capable, a lot of bad things would've happened (at least from my point of view).

Basically, the idea that intelligence infers a value system is something I've been long convinced is untrue, and I'm not sure why you think otherwise.

> meanwhile 3) the collective capability of the human species is apparently insufficient to stop this from happening.

Well, I'm hoping we aren't. But in order to stop it, we need to do something, and clearly most people aren't even convinced there's a real threat. Hopefully, we can stop an unsafe AGI before it gets built, and also hopefully, we can stop it after it exists. But if you're just assuming that we'll be able to stop it after it has already started to do things against our interest, I think you're being optimistic - even humanity has already created weapons that, had we decided to really use them, could've destroyed all other humans before they had a chance to respond.

> But I take it about as seriously as alien life trying to invade us, a random meteorite killing us all, a solar flare destroying the Earth or malicious time travelers.

Some of those things are more fanciful. But, some of those are real threats, e.g. random meteorite. It has wiped out entire species before. I agree we shouldn't be very scared of a low probability event that we can't control, but that's the difference - we can control AGI, before it gets built, and it doesn't appear to be low probability. Not to mention, most people agree that we should get off this planet to protect against meteorites, too!

As for aliens - if you were truly convinced that aliens would visit the Earth in 200 years - are you really telling me it wouldn't change anything about what you think humanity should be doing? I for one think we would definitely be spending time in preparing for that. And that's more-or-less how I look at AGI - we're creating an alien that will visit us between 50-1000 years from now, and we're not really sure when exactly. What should we do to prepare?