AGI to ASI might take hours if all that's needed is more compute. Such an intelligence might exponentially spread across the internet. Though I don't think it's the most likely scenario.
Sometimes I wonder what it is that enables some people to have empathy for strangers but others not. Is it mostly your upbringing? Genetics? Can people like you be fixed, or are you incorrigible?
This relies on the assumption (possibly correct but I don't think definitively established) that a multi-polar world where e.g. China enjoys a similar status to the US would result in them imposing their own values on the world in a similar manner to how the US has done or deposing distant governments. So far China's interactions with the world outside its immediate vicinity (Taiwan, India, SCS countries) have largely been of an economic nature rather than the more bomb-dropping and CIA-flavoured approach the US has taken. So I don't think that the United States' relative loss of power necessarily means a worse world for those outside the US (again, excluding China's immediate neighbours).
There is plenty of value in locking her up, among them letting financial criminals, who so often get off with laughably light sentences, know that if they steal massive amount of money from other people, their life, theirs personally, will be over.
We could eventually replace (parts of) the workforce if we were happy with the current standards of living (and prevented a small group from hoarding all the wealth). If we were satisfied with a 1850s standard of living, only a small portion of the modern workforce would need to work. What automation enables is greater productivity with the same amount of human effort/time. But because we seek to improve out living standards, we need to keep the same portion of people employed and productive. So I say, once we bring everyone to a decent standard of life, we can just stop and gradually liberate people from the shackles of work until society runs on a bunch of robots and a small core of maintainers.
Being unique is not what people mean when they talk about being extraordinary, though. With that term comes the connotation of not just being different from others, but being _better_ than others.
Why do you think public transport is horrible in comparison to cars? Do you feel that e.g. the environmental or cost benefits of public transport are outweighed by whatever cars have going for them?
I'd wager that much of that is because people are susceptible to be lured by the idea of strength. If you identify severe problems with how the world is, even an oppressive government like what the bolsheviks created that claims to solve them might seem like a ray of hope, and you might be willing to look past a lot of horrid things / convince yourself that they're not real so long as you believe those fundamental problems with the organisation of labour and wealth are being solved. It is worth noting that this infatuation was by no means universal - Camus and Sartre famously had a split over Soviet gulags, and Orwell consistently criticised the Soviet Union's authoritarianism despite both being socialists. The fact that only centralised, authoritarian socialist governments managed to take power in the first half of the 20th century has probably done irreparable damage to the idea of communism. If more moderate, decentralised, or liberal (as opposed to authoritarian) governments had managed to take power (such as in Spain) people might not be as quick to dismiss the (in my opinion, very real) structural issues in capitalist systems, and we might live in a better world today because of it - or perhaps that is just my infatuation with the counterfactual!
What about Finland? Very poor in the 1800s, rapidly industrialised and became wealthy in the 20th century. They did have a civil war but I'm not quite sure that counts as oppression by itself.
This is assuming that China's rapidly evolving navy cannot do anything about these blockades. They have massive shipbuilding capacity and currently the most advanced destroyer (type 055) in the world.
Cognitive scientists have been exploring this idea for a while, e.g. the Modularity of Mind Hypothesis. It would be very interesting to see if learnings from this field can be further applied to AI development.
With humans, the activity in the network results in coherent macro-level actions. With the internet, there is no such coherence. If the internet is conscious it is probably having a full-brain, 24/7 epilepsy seizure.