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.