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This is not a fully developed thought, but I'll throw it out there as well - another similarity I see is a combination of what I see as deep conceptual confusion alongside a baffled failure to understand that anybody thinks differently to them.
In this context I doubt it will be necessary to explain where I see the Marxist confusions. What is value? What constitutes exploitation? Why is incremental reform insufficient? Perhaps more controversial would be the idea that the AI people are similarly confused.
Let me take a simple example. What's alignment? There is a great deal of talk about it and I'm not sure it's a coherent category. Structuring AI to prioritise 'human values'? Great. What are those? What on Earth are those? Channelling Alisdair MacIntyre for a moment - Whose Alignment? Which Human Values? Presumably they would reply to me that they don't think they need to have a complete, comprehensive moral theory (after all, that has been baffling philosophers for millennia), but just need some broad strokes like "humans being alive is good" or "material prosperity is good", but I am unsatisfied that this is enough, especially considering the, well, crazy moonbat stuff that so many of these thinkers end up committing themselves to.
Moreover, just on the practical level, I can hardly resist pointing out that we can't align dumb technology, much less any hypothetical future AI. Phones are mis-aligned. Television is mis-aligned. There's a small cottage industry arguing that agriculture is mis-aligned. We have rarely aligned anything before now. It is a good idea in principle to design our tools to accomplish the tasks we intend them for, but every transformative technology before now has had unexpected, unintended, and frequently undesirable effects, alongside the intended effects.
Marxism describes a system that it calls 'capitalism', postulates a set of problems with that system which are both moral/ideological (exploitation, theft of surplus value, etc.) and empirical (the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, etc.), and then points the way to an imagined solution. I feel like 'AI safety' does something similar. Unfortunately I don't think either group is particularly tethered to reality. They both start from a series of reasonable observations about something happening in the world, but then go on to confidently build towers in the sky.
Your second point seems like the more fundamental critique. But I don't get it: "we fail at aligning other technologies, so it seems likely we'll inevitably fail at aligning AI" might have some bite at safety folks at frontier labs who are trying to build an aligned AI. But there's also plenty of people who see the task of aligning AI as about the same as the task of building and aligning COVID-49 i.e. something that just shouldn't be done.
Maybe there's a capability critique in there i.e. AI will never have the capabilities to pose an existential risk. But that is a separate question from the alignment/safety critique of AI (if that is your argument, of course alignment questions drop a lot in importance).
I suppose I do need to be careful here. I think of LLMs as just like any other technology, rather than a paradigm shift, and that means that while I think they will inevitably have effects that we can't predict, some of which will be undesirable, 'standard' safety precautions are sensible. No technology has wholly predictable efforts, but we don't abandon the entire idea of safety. So trying to make bots as safe as possible is a good idea.
What I think of when I hear people talk about 'alignment' or 'AI safety' feels different to that, though. The framing is generally not "let's try to make this tool as practical and safe as possible", just like every other tool we make, but rather "we are on the cusp of making robot gods who will radically change everything about what it is to be human, and we have to make sure that they turn out to be benevolent toward us".
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