The "alignment problem" as traditionally understood assumed a different path to AI development, where the best AIs wouldn't primarily operate on a substrate of human language. If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem, and it seems no less likely today than it did in 2023.
> If AI becomes powerful enough to make human employment non-viable without being post-scarcity enough to make permanent unemployment viable, that's going to be an existential problem
That's massively moving the goalposts on what counts as "an existential problem." The original framing was not economic dislocation but actual existence, i.e. existential. This new framing is a retreat to a way-of-life argument.
And I'm still calling baloney! The "AI will kill us all" argument backfired on Altman et al, so now we have an "it'll take over all the jobs" pitch. But it's all smoke and mirrors for investors. We have no good reason to expect current AI methods will lead to an AGI that can not only do most human labour, but do so economically competitively.
I don't understand how you can consider the AI industry to be in any sense retreating from prior claims. The existential problem remains an active near-future risk; you're hearing a lot about the jobs problem because it's already here, now, today. Do you not remember how much less capable AI systems were in 2023, and how implausible it seemed that they could become as good as they are now without new theoretical breakthroughs?
