I do not believe that 3a is sufficiently logically supported. The criticism of AI risk that have seemed the strongest to me have been about how there is no engagement in the AI alignment community about the various barriers that undercut this argument. Against them, The conjecture about what protein folding and ribosomes might one have the possibility to do really weak counterargument, based as it is on no empirical or evidentiary reasoning.
Specifically, I believe further nuance is needed about the can vs will distinction in the assumption that the first AGI to make a hostile move will have sufficient capability to reasonably guarantee decisive strategic advantage. Sure, it’s of course possible that some combination of overhang risk and covert action allows a leading AGI to make some amount of progress above and beyond humanity’s in terms of technological advancement. But the scope and scale of that advantage is critical, and I believe it is strongly overstated. I can accept that an AGI could foom overnight—that does not mean that it will, simply by virtue of it being hypothetically possible.
All linked resources and supporting arguments have a common thread of taking it for granted that cognition alone can give an AGI a decisive technology lead. My model of cognition is instead of a logarithmically decreasing input into the rate of technological change. A little bit of extra cognition will definitely speed up scientific progress on exotic technological fronts, but an excess of cognition is not fungible for other necessary inputs to technological progress, such as the need for experimentation for hypothesis testing and problem solving on real world constraints related to unforeseen implementation difficulties related to unexplored technological frontiers.
Based on this, I think the fast takeoff hypothesis falls apart and a slow takeoff hypothesis is a much more reasonable place to reason from.
There’s a parallelism here between the mental constructs you’re referring to and the physical architecture of the human body. For instance, each lobe of our brain has been associated with various tasks, goals, and activities. When you take a breath, your Medulla Oblongata has taken in information about levels of carbon dioxide in the blood via pH monitoring, decided that your blood has too much carbon dioxide, and has sent a request to the respiratory center to breathe. But you’ve also got a cerebral cortex that also gets a say in the decisions made by the respiratory center, and those two brain areas negotiate via highly complex, fully unconscious interactions to decide what directive the respiratory center actually follows.
To summarize: you’re now breathing manually.