I read the article you linked to, both parts. I wonder how much of people having psychotic breaks in the rationalist community is due to 1) people with tendencies toward mental illness gravitating toward rationalism or 2) rationalism being a way to avoid built-in biases in human thought, but those biases being important to keeping us sane on an individual level. (If you fully grasp the idea that everyone might die, and have an emotional reaction to that that's proportional compared to just one person you know, it can be devastating). I think we are bad at thinking about big numbers and risks, because being very good at evaluating risks is actually not great for short term, individual survival -- even if it's good for survival as a species.
I know personally the whole AI/AGI thing has got me really down. It's a struggle to reconcile it with how little a lot of people seem to put stock in the idea of AGI ending up in control of humanity at some point. I totally agree that everything on your list is a real issue -- but I think that, even if we completely solve all those issues, how do we not end up with a society where most important decisions are eventually made by AGI? My assumptions are 1) that we eventually make AGI which is just superior to humans in terms of making decisions and planning, and 2) there will be significant pressure from capitalism and competition among governments to use AGI over people once that's the case. Similar to how automation has almost always won out over hand-production so far for manufactured goods.
That's more the scenario Paul Christiano worries about than Yudkowsky. It seems more likely to me. But I still think that a lot of our mental heuristics about what we should worry about break down when it comes to the creation of something that out-guns us in terms of brainpower, and I think Yudkowsky makes a lot of good points about how we tend to shy away from facing reality when reality could be dreadful. That it's really easy to have a mental block about inventing something that makes humanity go extinct, where if it's possible to do that, there's no outside force that will swoop in and stop us like a parent stopping a child from falling into a river. If this is a real danger, we have to identify it in advance and take action to prevent it, even while there are a bunch of other problems to deal with, and even while a lot of people don't believe in it, and even while there's a lot of money to be made in the meantime but each bit takes us closer to a bad outcome. Reality isn't necessarily fair, we could be really screwed, and have all the problems you mentioned in addition to the risk of AGI killing us all (either right away or taking over and just gradually using up all the resources we need to live like we've done to so many species).