For the sake of argument, let's assume OP is correct: the finance industry and corporations in general are indeed blood-sucking vampire squids jamming their funnels into everything that smells of money and are antithetical to human values. (I strongly disagree with it, but others are criticizing that aspect, so I'll move on.)

So what? How does this justify his conclusion:

> But they have chosen a fantasy version of the problem, when human interests are being fucked over by actual existing systems right now. All that brain-power is being wasted on silly hypotheticals, because those are fun to think about, whereas trying to fix industrial capitalism so it doesn’t wreck the human life-support system is hard, frustrating, and almost certainly doomed to failure.

Even if the finance industry / corporations are a parasite, so what? That doesn't wish away AI: AI will still remain a threat (or not a threat) regardless of whether Goldman Sachs is dissolved. Threats are not a zero-sum game: if you show that finance is a parasite, that doesn't suddenly alter the universe to guarantee AI is safe and easy.

Even if we interpret him charitably as making a nuanced cost-effectiveness argument that 'we face many threats, have very limited resources, and corporations are more cost-effective to fight than working on AI', that still seems pretty darn unlikely. Corporations are a major political issue which attract the attention and effort of hundreds of thousands of people and inspire real world action like Occupy Wall Street; why does this fight need a few more people in it? Diminishing returns set in a very long time ago. And fundamentally, financial types have (or have not) been parasites throughout history. Their impact is bounded. They are not anything new under the sun.

Whereas with AI, we don't know whether AI will ever exist; whether the impact will be huge or close to zero; hardly anyone takes it remotely seriously (quick question: have you ever read a mainstream article which did not make either a _Termintor_ or 'Rapture of the Nerds' allusion?); and the sum total of all efforts on thinking about the topic is, what, maybe $7m a year? (Google's safety board + MIRI + FHI + the new existential risk org whose name escapes me). You have to assume some pretty extreme values to make cost-effectiveness criterion spit out 'nobody should be thinking about AI! Everyone should be swotting up their Marx!'

Conflating socially-harmful corporations with 'hostile AI' does both topics a disservice.