You've got it backwards. In the Glorious Hacker News Golden Age that people sometimes speak of, Hacker News tended to gravitate towards pure-market solutions, deny the existence or relevance of social issues that don't affect white middle class men (i.e. everything but ageism in tech), and gave weight to Eliezer Yudkowsky's Bayesian equation-driven morality, and everything else that looked and sounded scientific (imagine how many old-HN readers would be guzzling Soylent now).
The HN readership had lots in common with LessWrong, but they were diluted and displaced by people who don't share their same, ahem, qualities.
$HELL? Is that SHELL with a $? Is that Shell Oil and Gas? Is Shell Oil a problem for the human race? I suppose it could be, but your point escapes me.
Or maybe the $ is a typo and you mean the Christian notion of Hell? Is Hell a problem for the human race? Not likely as, even if it exists, it's only a problem in the after life. So again, your point escapes me.
We all ready have a well defined rigorous AGI[0] that would have god like intelligence. There are some approximations that played pacman [1] without knowing anything specific about pacman itself. i.e. it learned how to play by itself.
If by "null hypothesis", you mean artificial intelligence that exceeds human intelligence is impossible, that is a bold claim. Since human intelligence is nothing more than a successful evolutionary algorithm implemented in 3-dimensional cellular networks, it is inevitable that we'll be able to copy and improve the algorithm at some point in the future. Then we'll have artificial intelligence that exceeds human intelligence. Then what?
The HN readership had lots in common with LessWrong, but they were diluted and displaced by people who don't share their same, ahem, qualities.