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"In a sense, this would be an uninhabited society. It would be a society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit. A Disneyland without children." - Nick Bostrom
I'd also add some preferences regarding population and personality and such, but "do our successors have any intrinsic value or not" does seem to be the first and most important criterion to have!
However, I'm confused by the use of the phrase "make sure" here. Unless you're expecting to be uploaded, and you're confident that the idea of a "p-zombie" is incoherent (which I'm guessing you aren't, given the Chinese room reference), what observations could give you any sense of surety here? Today's LLMs can pass Turing tests, which used to be our "fine, they're sentient now" criterion, but their lack of "medium-term" memory and they fact that they still can "slip" in ways that make them seem non-sentient makes us think in hindsight that our criterion was just inadequate, and yet we haven't really found anything to replace it. If tomorrow's LLMs never slip, does that mean they've become sentient, or does that just mean they've become better at faking it?
If it can be a true successor, with intelligence, agency, and everything, it's probably sentient. If we can't figure out what sentience is in the mean time, maybe we don't deserve to keep existing into the future anyway. It's probably not that hard, but humans are very disappointing currently.
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