Suppose I value human life at all, why is a scenario with no humans but an AI and microplastics and earthworks remaining better than the scenario with only microplastics and earthworks remaining?
I wouldn't say it's better, just it's not a future that needs to be prevented. If the planet becomes uninhabitable due to human caused climate change & manufacturing waste, then it isn't the fault of the surviving AI society that survives
There's a lot of hypothetical scenarios. In an AI society you have replicable identity. Politics becomes a matter of control over computational resources. In that scenario Earth isn't an ideal environment, the upper class of AI entities will be seeking asteroid mining & setting up shop near the sun for maximal solar power (I remember years ago watching a talk about how if bitcoin succeeded the eventual madness would be mining moving to satellites around the sun, causes some division in consensus due to transmission time)
The problem AI regulation needs to address is its non-AGI use in making mass surveillance & genocide more efficient, directed by governments/corporations. Humans becoming obsolete is a red herring
(the author of article may not think AGI is the reason regulation is needed, they didn't clarify what degree AI regulation they consider necessary, only focused on refuting a bad argument against AI regulation)
edit: rereading, you may've been responding to "& hopefully some non human biological life", I specifically mentioned 'non human' since that was responding to a hypothetical where humans are extinct, so I was merely making a redundant distinction
The AI would be left, but there's no reason to expect it to have a human appreciation of the world. It might just be a brutally efficient self-replicator, basically a sociopath. It wouldn't need beauty, love, emotions or anything like that. That seems like a bad outcome to me if we get replaced by such a creature, just as bad as a scorched earth.