I haven't seen a positive article on AI from mainstream press in at least a year.
Yeah, under those conditions public sentiment is going to be influenced in a given direction.
Sam Altman, Yoshua Bengio, and Geoffrey Hinton all think AGI is coming soon and could be an existential threat to all of humanity.
So I agree, I don't expect people (tech startups) to understand something (AGI x-Risk) when their job (developing AGI and making $) depends on them not understanding it.
Think back to the last time you got frustrated with a computer system that wouldn't do the right thing as you see it, but there was nobody to actually complain to. Now imagine that same wretched program has control over your biosphere or somehow controls your off switch.
Granted, there are very limited positive aspects of nuclear weapons, while positive potential aspects of AI could arguably outweigh the risks.
Even with something like nukes, while yes dangerous and terrible weapons, it's arguably quite likely that without them existing we'd have had WWIII by now but for the threat of mutually assured destruction.
How 'bad' and 'good' things in narrow scopes actually play out across exponentially larger scopes is almost impossible to predict or qualify.
(Also, a lot of the classic threat modeling for AI was extrapolating obsolete anthropological models of past intelligence emergence on precursor species. We just sort of continue carrying forward a number of assumptions we should arguably be much more critical of.)
Yeah there’s no such thing as the alignment problem. Shrug.
What do you mean there's no such thing as the alignment problem? People like Rob Miles talk about it all the time. Corrigibility will be a problem, I guarantee it.