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Your complaint appears to be that this group of people concerned specific with a singularity event needs to instead focus their efforts on something you don't even seem to think AI is needed to make happen. And as an aside, all the thinkers I've read that you would consider AI-Safety aligned have in fact voiced concerns about things like turning drones over to AI. Their most famous proponent, big yud wants to nuke the AI datacenters.
You're just describing a subset of unaligned AI where the AI is aligned with a despot rather than totally unaligned. Or, if the general intelligence isn't necessary for this, then it's a bog standard anti-surveillance stance that isn't related to AI-safety. The AI-Safety contingent would absolutely say that this is an unaligned use of AI and would further go on to say that if the AI was sufficiently strong it would be unaligned to its master and turn against their interests too. The goal of AI safety is the impossibly difficult task of either preventing a strong AI future at all or engineering an AI aligned with human interests that would not go along with the whole 1984 plan.
Huh? No, AI is necessary to make it happen, but the current version that we have is sufficient. Like you point out, it would make no sense for me to bring it up in an AI conversation otherwise.
Yes, because he's obsessed with fantasy doomsday scenarios, rather than far more realistic ones. That's my criticism.
Everything I saw from the rat-sphere of the subject, including the concept of "alignment", assumes AI will have agency, and goals that it will be pursuing. None of it is necessary for the dangers that AI will bring.
Again, defining the field in such a way that it ignores the most likely risks, is exactly the issue I have with AI-safety.
How is that useful? I don't care about what they call "aligned" and "not aligned", I care about how a given scenario could come about, and how it could be prevented (and no, "nuke data centers" doesn't count). This would be another part of the criticism I have of the entire field.
The "AI-Safety" people as you call them have a particular interest in alignment as AI hits super intelligence. They don't need to be wearing their "AI-safety" hats to oppose a surveillance state. You don't need any kind of special MIRI knowledge to oppose surveillance states and people have opposed them for a long time. This is the kind of scope creep criticism that leftists do when the accuse climate focused causes of not focusing enough on police injustice against BIPOCs.
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