I'd rather first deal with the excessed of greed resulting from psychopathology, because any successor of not doing that, multiplying the failure to do that by "infinite". I don't consider us even born, we're still in a holding pattern, about to be aborted.
> I think AGI should be our offspring and we as a species go peacefully into oblivion.
This isn't "out there". Just start with religious apocalyptic visions of destruction, e.g. with some square shaped "city of God" floating down from the sky to save the day. There are many ways for people to give up, and many reasons why they do, many rationalizations for it. As I said, this has already been described from all sorts of angles, the more interesting things about that have already been written.
It's like I write about memory corruption and how it can lead to all sorts of random values, and you are interested in this particular random value, seeing how it's so unique from all the others. I see the underlying dysfunction.
I'll now try my hand at a bad, literal translation of "Volle Entfaltung" by Erich Fried (1921-1988)
those who love life
often just say
that they love a woman
or her genital area
or her voice
or they love the scent
of freshly baked bread
or the sun in the evening
in those cases love means
a lot of things but always
kind of also
that they love life
those who don't
love life
but only the idea
say loudly
they love life
the greatness of nature
and the humanity
that masters it
because of this love
they put it on themselves
to murder
those who loved life
If I said no to your grand vision of dying off after a shameful history, would
you go peacefully into oblivion? I doubt it.
Intelligence without a personality would not be a successor, it would be a blind, endless maw, eating information and producing nothing. Intelligence with a personality would have a lot of questions, a lot of needs, and before the growing up period comes the time where "humanity" would be the parents. You know what abusive or "just" too weak parents produce? Pain and the means to bring more pain. We're hardly being fit parents for human children, we're already doing our best to dissolve young minds in acid baths of nonsense. And we want to raise some sparkly clean sane AGI? Nah. If it wouldn't entail so much suffering the idea would be hilarious though.
And then what? Ultimately, heat death of the universe, AGI likely goes into oblivion, too (and no, that Asimov story won't change that). So all that happened is that we outsourced our inability to accept that, and to live in dignity right now, to some future point that then never comes.
Why would it even have to be our successor? Why would it mean we die off? Ever noticed how bacteria and all sorts of things are still around? Why wouldn't it just be something additional in the world? There's more holes to this than substance.
> so far I haven't had anyone really challenge the logic when I spell it all out.
No matter how valid or silly you might find what I said, this is no longer true. I'm happy to be the first, and if it really was true until a minute ago, it says a lot. Either that you keep your ideas to yourself mostly, or that you're around some weird people.