You can reply that AI researchers are smart and want to survive, so they are likely to invent alignment techniques that are better than the (deplorably inadequate) techniques that have been discussed and published so far, and I will reply that counting on their inventing these techniques in time is an unacceptable risk when the survival of humanity is at stake -- particularly as the outfit (namely the Machine Intelligence Research Institute) with the most years of experience in looking for an actually-adequate alignment technique has given up and declared that humanity's only chance is if frontier AI research is shut down because at the rate that AI capabilities are progressing, it is very unlikely that anyone is going to devise an adequate alignment technique in time.
It is fucked-up that frontier AI research has not been banned already.
As for employment, automation makes people more productive. It doesn't reduce the number of earning opportunities that exist. Quite the opposite, actually. As the amount of production increases relative to the human population, per capita GDP and income increase as well.
US Real GDP per capita is $70k, and has grown 2.4x since 1975: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/A939RX0Q048SBEA
US Real Median income per capita is $42k, and has grown 1.5 since 1975. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N
The divergence between the two matters a lot. It reflects the impacts of both technology-driven automation and globalization of capital. Generative AI is unlike any prior technology given its ability to autonomously create and perform what has traditionally been referred to as "knowledge work". Absent more aggressive redistribution, AI will accelerate the divergence between median income and GDP, and realistically AI can't be stopped.
Powerful new technologies can reduce the number and quality of earning opportunities that exist, and have throughout history. Often they create new and better opportunities, but that is not a guarantee.
> We will have aligned AI helping us.
Who is the "us" that aligned AI is helping? Workers? Small business-people? Shareholders in companies that have the capital to build competitive generative AI? Perhaps on this forum those two groups overlap, but it's not the case everywhere.
This is an assumption, how would you know if you have alignment? AGI could appear to align, just as a psychopath appears studies and emulates well behaved people. Imagine that at a scale we can't possibly understand. We don't really know how any of these emergent behaviors really work, we just throw more data and compute and fine tunings at it, bake it, and then see.
There are so many ways we have misplaced confidence with what is essentially a system we don't really understand fully. We just keep anthropomorphizing the results and thinking "yeah, this is how humans think so we understand". We don't know for sure if that's true, or if we are being deceived, or making fundamental errors in judgement due to not having enough data.
I admire your optimism about the goals of all humans, but evidence tends to point to this not being the goal of all (or even most) humans, much less the people who control the AIs.
A rogue AI destroying humanity (whatever that means) is not a likely outcome. That's just movie stuff.
What is more likely is a modern oligarchy and serfdom that emerge as AI devalues most labor, with no commensurate redistribution of power and resources to the masses, due to capture of government by owners of AI and hence capital.
Are you sure people won't go along with that?
