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I guess I'm more Deist-by-Simulation-Hypothesis, though I've been wrestling with what simulation means for our ability to understand reality.
In a literal sense, sure he's terrible as an omnibenevolent omnipotent being, as Lisbon discovered. But in a practical sense, He has His uses! A God that suppresses marriage between relatives, a God that demands monogamy, a God expected to uphold oaths and enforce pro-social behaviour via punishment in the afterlife, that deity has great power. We could easily list the flaws too. Like all other technologies, religion has pros and cons depending on how it's configured. Many Christians do good work in charity, others do bad work. The suppression of incest alone might have pushed up IQ a couple of points, an inestimable boon for the devout! Anyway, the Christian God is dying, other deities are emerging, including god-machines.
I think there might be some kind of conservation of religiosity going on. Religion is such a powerful entity. Traditionally people had religious feelings about celestial bodies, their dead ancestors and spiritual entities. Environmentalists have religious feelings about plants, animals and industry. Nationalists have religious feelings about their co-ethnics.
You and I have vaguely religious feelings about trends in computing and scientific development. They provide eschatology. There will be semidivine beings soon capable of reading our thoughts and memories (plus trawling through our digital history), capable of vast cruelty or benevolence. We're actually right and have by far the strongest physical/technical forces on our side.
But most people find this laughably silly. I tried to convince some friends of mine about this stuff and they politely suggested I was mentally ill. I'll enjoy gloating to them later on. Most people don't think like we do, they're rooted in aesthetics. They see soy-looking techbros and are repulsed. It's like that cringey kid with the 'In this moment I am euphoric, I am enlightened by my own intelligence' quote that did such terrible damage to atheism. It had nothing to do with metaphysics, yet it was more powerful than 10,000 logical arguments. Even Marxism-Leninism has more pull than our AI-singularitarian beliefs have, it speaks to most people far better than we do. There's great power in these social forces that I wish understood.
I accept the premise that some people are more motivated by aesthetics than others, but I also think that many of those who claim to "not care about aesthetics" aren't as entirely free of of the grasp of aesthetics as they imagine themselves to be. If you resonate with this particular vision of infinite power, as opposed to all other competing visions of infinite power, then that clearly reveals an aesthetic preference on your part.
I experience the revulsion you noted quite strongly, so I'm happy to answer questions about it.
It's broadly caused by some combination of 1) the general smugness that often accompanies techno-optimism, and 2) the content of the beliefs themselves. I can tolerate somewhat more arrogance from people I already agree with, but even then there's a limit, and past that limit I start to sour quickly. You chose a fitting example - I'm an atheist, but if an atheist starts getting too euphoric in an internet argument then I absolutely start to root against him. I have an instinctual aversion to people who lack humility and I imagine I'm not alone in that.
When Sam Altman styles himself as being at the center of the most important events in human history, all I can think is... dear God, please don't let these people win. Don't let reality be like that.
As for the actual object-level issues, opinions will vary widely, but you should at least be aware that not everyone will find your personal vision of utopia to be very utopian.
The key thing is that there are no other competing visions of immense power, not in the material physical sense.
I can appreciate the aesthetics of other scenarios and yet I know they won't come about just because I find them cool and superior. I said this before and I'll say it again, the tradbros who say stuff like 'Cool story Roko but your vision of an earth populated by trillions of bugmen has no relevance - the good life is best achieved by an aristocratic band of horseback warriors riding out on the plains'. There is a certain aesthetic quality to the trad lifestyle. I believe it fits human needs quite well. But if it goes up against self_made_human's vision, it gets smashed into paste and trivialized to the point of being pathetic, surviving only on reservations if that. Hey, it already got smashed into paste by 19th century armies.
Imagine the Qing courtier who deeply resented the foreign devils, bringing disharmony with their weird gadgets and disrespectful mercantile practices. Surely China knew better, with all the millennia of philosophy? Well, no they didn't. They fell behind and suffered severely for it. China learnt a very valuable lesson that I fear we've neglected.
Humility and subjective ideas of moral virtue can't save you from superior firepower. I think the greatest kind of humility is respecting the structure of the universe. If the universe favours the cruel, brutish, horseback archer to the hard-working, peaceful peasant - there's nothing we can do about it, the rules hold. If the regimented, robotic columns of riflemen beat the noble, free horsemen, then so be it. If swarms of tiny robots overmatch the manly courage and patriotic zeal of all human warriors, that's that. There can be change on the margins (who gets uploaded, what distribution of resources happens) and these changes are supremely important! But we still go through the phase-change even if we think it's ugly and depraved that clusters of jumped-up graphics cards become so powerful.
A literal god wouldn't have to engage in deep space exploration, if he didn't want to. He could furnish himself whatever sort of environment he wanted, for whatever activities he wanted. That's what I meant by competing visions.
The preoccupation with planets and supernovae and immense distances reveals, as I said, an aesthetic preference.
Your use of this sort of language may be related to why your ideas aren't "speaking to people" the way you want them to.
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