I think this is the “shred of hope” is the root of the disagreement—you are interpreting Elizer’s 50-year comment as “in some weird hypothetical world, … ” and you are trying to point out that the weird world is so weird that the tiny likelihood we are in that world does not matter, but Elizer’s comment was about a counterfactual world that we know we are not in—so the specific structure of that counterfactual world does not matter (in fact, it is counterfactual exactly because it is not logically consistent). Basically, Elizer’s argument is roughly “in a world where unaligned AI is not a thing that kills us all [not because of some weird structure of a hypothetical world, but just as a logical counterfactual on the known fact of “unaligned AGI” results in humanity dying], …” where the whole point is that we know that’s not the world we are in. Does that help? I tried to make the counterfactual world a little more intuitive to think about by introducing friendly aliens and such, but that’s not what was originally meant there, I think.
I think this is the “shred of hope” is the root of the disagreement—you are interpreting Elizer’s 50-year comment as “in some weird hypothetical world, … ” and you are trying to point out that the weird world is so weird that the tiny likelihood we are in that world does not matter, but Elizer’s comment was about a counterfactual world that we know we are not in—so the specific structure of that counterfactual world does not matter (in fact, it is counterfactual exactly because it is not logically consistent). Basically, Elizer’s argument is roughly “in a world where unaligned AI is not a thing that kills us all [not because of some weird structure of a hypothetical world, but just as a logical counterfactual on the known fact of “unaligned AGI” results in humanity dying], …” where the whole point is that we know that’s not the world we are in. Does that help? I tried to make the counterfactual world a little more intuitive to think about by introducing friendly aliens and such, but that’s not what was originally meant there, I think.