Altman and friends' "stop us before we shoot grandma" PR tour in 2023 and '24 is largely the cause of this AI backlash. If you tell everyone you're building something that will kill us all, you will scare up investors. But you'll also turn the public against you. In truth, we have zero evidence of the alignment problem to date in the existential form. Instead, it's the usual technology enabling bad actors stuff.
That's massively moving the goalposts on what counts as "an existential problem." The original framing was not economic dislocation but actual existence, i.e. existential. This new framing is a retreat to a way-of-life argument.
And I'm still calling baloney! The "AI will kill us all" argument backfired on Altman et al, so now we have an "it'll take over all the jobs" pitch. But it's all smoke and mirrors for investors. We have no good reason to expect current AI methods will lead to an AGI that can not only do most human labour, but do so economically competitively.
This has become some kind of truism that has little actual evidence. It was said it would happen in 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, and is still being said but it isn't true. The models got better this year but they've always gotten better. And none of the recent improvements have been as dramatic as say GPT3 to GPT4. I feel crazy. People are saying the sky is falling but every researcher or person who analyzes these issues professionally says the opposite.
As far as the paperclip problem is concerned, we’ve already had that problem for a long time now in the form of good old fashioned human institutions.