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Notes -
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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