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Notes -
I think yudkowsky recently renamed his field to "AI not-kill-everyone-ism" specifically to distinguish it from those other relatively minor concerns. "AI safety" is in fact no associated with the alignment problem if you talk to run of the mill professors and researchers, they still mean safety in the sense of "how can I prevent my half a million dollar robot taking actions that fry its motors?" or "how can we ensure privacy when training this LLM on user data?".
Having a goal of "the world doesn't end" does have its advantages. Can't wait until 2030, AI still doesn't kill anyone, and Yud saying "you are welcome" graciously lifting his fedora. Though who am I kidding, the world will then be in need of saving from AI killing everyone by year 20XX.
I don't think you're being charitable enough to Yudkowsky and AI safety people, I think he has a very specific and falsifiable model of AI killing everyone. In my own model, if we are all still alive in 2033 AND we have AI that routinely can write scientific papers of moderate quality or higher, I think the problem will have turned out to be much easier than expected, and I don't further expect humanity to need to be saved by 2050 or something.
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