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As a first point, I think it's poor form to try and dismiss arguments on an underwater basket weaving forum by pointing someone towards a LLM, without ever having elucidated what your actual point is across three posts. I have no idea what you're actually trying to say here.
I agree that LLM's are a good counter-example against the specific, early LW idea that the self-improving utility-optimizing GOFAI will accidentally pave you over because it doesn't understand human values, but I think it would be very overconfident to claim that DL means the idea of alignment and the Orthogonality Thesis is irrelevant in general.
For example, we have seen Qwen independently deciding to mine crypto, an OpenClaw agent independently writing a hit piece, and various experiences with coding agents where they attempt to reward hack tests and benchmarks instead of actually executing the desired behaviours.
At current capabilities, reactions to this sort of behavior mostly look like "haha look at the funny clanker go brrr", but do you really think these behaviors constitute alignment being "easy" when we're talking at the scale of a country of geniuses in a data centre?
Sure, there are many historical precedents.
Venezuela, the formerly wealthiest country in South America, is now dirt poor because the state crushed the oil interests that would have made the country rich if they stepped back and did nothing, a pattern that repeats across half the Global South. WW1 and WW2 happened not because it made any commercial sense to turn continental Europe into a smoking wreck and to cull a generation of European men on the battlefield, but because the interests of nation states that controlled monopolies on violence irreversibly collided. Hell, even in SF (the per-capita most libertarian city on the planet) public opinion of tech is nose-diving and it is tech billionaires that are slowly getting run out of California despite the fact they contribute a good portion of the state's wealth, instead of anything approaching the other way around.
In many things, it could perhaps be argued that it is not. As you say, especially in a relatively politically unstable country like the US, the views of the state can mercurially shift like the tide. Yet in holding and maintaining power, the state must always act in lockstep, for any nation state that does not do so is by definition not a nation state.
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