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For pretty much every other sort of technology with safety concerns, we don't just say "don't let it get out of the box". We also don't throw up our hands and claim it needs a general-purpose "alignment" solution and nothing else matters, which is what Anthropic and OpenAI seems to be doing. Generally we start putting boxes in boxes of layered safety and only have tragic outcomes when all the holes in the "swiss cheese model" align.
Look at civil aviation: it's tremendously safe overall, but only because of rules and practices built up over a century of accidents. But it's not solved by a "one weird trick" alignment, but by many layers of safety and security. Accidents, when they do happen, typically could have been stopped by one of the layers catching it.
In that recent Amazon crash, the pilot touched down despite the other human voice (a qualified pilot!) in the cockpit calling it too fast, despite rules requiring stabilized approach configuration minutes before they tried to extend the flaps as they crossed the runway threshold, despite numerous automated call outs from the aircraft safety systems ("sink rate", "minimums", "too low terrain" twice --- I don't believe any of those are normal in a landing). If they had gone around on any of those indicators as generally required in their training, it'd have just been another day.
From what I know, the rules for nuclear and chemical plants are similar: we design them so many things have to go wrong before a single safety issue occurs. Any we (should) take all such things (near misses) seriously. But our AI corporate overlords seem to think they know better with "alignment".
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