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I don't like the "writing science fiction" characterization because it reads as inappropriately dismissive. We're not talking about holodecks or matter assemblers; we're talking about a technology that already exists. The only speculation involved is how much better it can actually get. You could in principle train and RLHF and RAG and whatever a personally-aligned model today, you probably just don't have the resources.
Gwern is 100% correct (and far from the first person to notice) that the current business model for AI is the same as every other tech business model in the information age: to take de facto and de jure control of as much of commerce and governance as possible and then rent it back to people in perpetuity. The open source software movement was a reaction to this decades ago. The main difference at present is that AI development is a lot more difficult to do at home (though of course not impossible!), especially while the current players have a hard lock on the anticipated production runs of all the necessary hardware. Memory and storage prices have quadrupled or more; for the first time in my life, desktop computers more than 3 years old have actually appreciated in value.
I agree with the "Guardian Angel" mission as stated. It's the only real effort I've seen from anyone to align AIs properly: with individual humans, rather than with corporate or government values. But I am not optimistic about their chances.
I am not sure a"Guardian Angel" is either possible or useful, but ignoring that... the worst trend among "rationalists" in the anti-AI movement is to propose that the average person just not be permitted to have some computing technology. Scott's Plan A is in this category, and on LW people have proposed that AI should not book a trip to a bullfight or should be made illegal for you to use if anyone abuses one of that model. Companies and governments don't like it that consumers have access to general purpose computing, and the "anti AI" movement is playing right into their hands.
Pressure from computer geeks has been the only thing that's helped at all against this trend, even to a weak degree. If the anti-AI movement makes computer geeks change sides, it'll be an apocalypse for general purpose computing even if the AI apocalypse isn't real.
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