> Again, optimization to some narrow goal has too many weak points to take over all of humanity's functions.
It doesn't have to take over all of humanity's functions to wreak havoc. A hypothetical AI disaster could be one goal-oriented system with a poorly constructed goal and enough initial resources.
> I'm unconvinced that this is blatantly untrue. "Moral right" is subjective - hence the point. We got to our morals today not through mysticism but empiricism so it's not out of the reach of superintelligence to optimize further.
I think you're making a fundamental and unwarranted assumption here.
You're anthropomorphizing "superintelligence" as something vaguely human-like but better. A system doesn't have to be "intelligent" in a sense that relates at all to what humans think of as "intelligent" to be dangerous. It could simply be a "really powerful optimization process". You're romanticizing the notion of a superintelligent being discarding human values and inventing some new moral system that it then follows, and ignoring the possibility of an algorithm no "smarter" than a nanobot instructed to make a copy of itself. That nanobot doesn't have an interesting value system; it doesn't need one to kill everyone and everything, though. And that's not an outcome that, individually or as a species, we should take any pride or "comfort" in.
You're also assuming that the ability to destroy the world requires some kind of intelligent process or executive function, and could not possibly be discovered by an optimization process. It wouldn't necessarily come across such a mechanism at random, but may of the approaches we might apply towards the creation of useful AI could provide exceptionally powerful pattern recognition capabilities, and search abilities.
As a complete hypothetical off the top of my head, imagine a ridiculously powerful pattern-search program effectively recreating the idea of afl-fuzz ("throw input at a program and find interesting behavior"), and applying it against the mechanisms running it in a sandbox. Improbable, but not wildly impossible, and an agent that succeeded would gain access to additional computation resources that would allow it to do better than the algorithms it competes with. So, now you have a complex pattern-search engine trained to break out of sandboxes...