Neither have the concerns from AI alignment folk. I’d say both groups are pretty far off (and both fairly useless), but the ethics folks are at least a little closer to reality.
Of course, AI alignment folks have the advantage that they can keep pushing the time frame forward and saying it’s perpetually just around the corner (a fairly common practice for doomsday believers whose doomsday never comes to pass).
> The other concerns, such as mass unemployment
After the Great Recession there was a high level of unemployment. Many argued that this was the result of the recession, and that if we fixed the issues in the economy the labor markets would rebound. Others argued that this wasn’t the case at all, that the market was either soft because American workers suddenly lacked high tech skills (one of the reasons STEM became fixed in the popular imagination), or because the robots were taking our jobs and the jobs weren’t going to come back.
The “robots are taking our jobs” group told us that this was just beginning - unemployment was going to get significantly worse over the next few years (the previous decade). Self driving cars were going to cause millions of truckers to be unemployed by 2020. The idea that new jobs would appear to replace ones that were lost was completely dismissed.
As we’ve seen from the improvements in the labor market over the past few years, the folks who said the soft market was the temporary result of a giant recession appear to be correct. The folks who said the robots took the jobs and they were never coming back were clearly wrong. If anything, they probably had a negative impact on the labor market by trying to convince people that nothing could be done to get the jobs back and encouraging inaction.