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The reason you don't see any object-level discussion of AI safety is that no one understands how LLMs work. We know how to make them, we know how to finetune them for certain tasks, we know how to RLHF them to avoid certain overt behaviors, but no one has any idea what a single one of GPT-3's 175,000,000,000 parameters means. There isn't anyone at OpenAI you can talk to who can point to anything and say, "Yep, that's the part that encodes all the ways the model knows how to kill people. Here are the input weights we can change to make it more likely to prefer guns, knives, poison, etc."
We also didn't really know anything about how the human brain worked a hundred years ago. But we managed to build stable-ish societies despite that lack of understanding. I don't feel this problem is insurmountable. I do like the idea of slowing the hell down. It does seem that with our current technology that we are more capable of understanding LLMs than we are of understanding the human brain.
Stable-ish societies took a long time to develop at any scale. There was also apparently a lot of selective breeding against violence, rape etc. If humans had suddenly gone from early ape intelligence to modern human intelligence overnight, we might have been too busy plotting how to kill each other and developing sharper clubs to develop stable-ish societies.
Cultural and biological evolution can achieve a lot, but usually only with a lot of time.
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Hence the "shoggoth with wearing a smiley mask" analogy. We can see the giant blob of [extradimensional math] behind the cutesy, approachable user interface, but ain't nobody who can comprehend it without losing their mind.
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