Still, “AI existential risk” is practically a different beast from “AI alignment,” and I’m trying to argue that the latter is not just for experts, but that it’s mostly a sociopolitical question of selection.
Perhaps that has to do with the fact that aligning LLM-based AI systems has become a pseudo predictable engineering problem solvable via a "target, measure and reiterate cycle" rather than the highly philosophical and moral task old AI Alignment researchers thought it would be.
Alignment has always been "what it actually does doesn't match what it's meant to do".
When the crowd that believes that AI will inevitably become an all-powerful God owned the news cycle, alignment concerns were of course presented through that lens. But it's actually rather interesting if approached seriously, especially when different people have different ideas about what it's meant to do.