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Notes -
They very much haven't.
I think it is impossible to overstate just how far outside of the bounds of thought EY style doomerism has been and remains for... well, everyone except the "rationalists." It is literally impossible to talk about "AI safety" with normal human beings without them looking at you like you have two heads. The logic doesn't matter. The world runs on inductive reasoning, not deductive reasoning. Because "AI safety" has never been a problem in real life so far, it is literally impossible for normal people to understand it, much less take it seriously. If you try to explain it, you will notice that they cock their heads while they listen to you, and this is from the cognitive effort of rewriting your arguments in realtime as they hear them to be about jobs and racial bias instead of AI safety.
I am not an AI doomer. I ascribe to exactly your view with respect to Erlich and Yudkowksy, and it's well said.
But I am reporting to you, from the corporate front lines, that every single person in a position of authority has a brain defect that makes it literally impossible for them to understand the concept of "AI safety." They don't disagree with AI safety concerns; they cannot disagree with the concerns, because they cannot understand them, because when you articulate a thought about AI safety, the words completely fail to engender concepts in their brain that relate to AI safety. They cannot even understand that other people have thoughts about the concept of AI safety, except perhaps as a marketing ploy to overstate the the commercial utility of various AI-powered systems.
So the PR people have not planned a response, and the policy people have not engaged with the concept, and the executives have not been briefed, and you should expect large companies to continue acting as uncomprehending about the topic of AI safety as they would about the threat of office wall art coming to life and eating their children.
"The Facebook algorithm accidentally ordered the genocide of the Rohingya in Burma in order to drive clicks" is sufficiently truth-adjacent that I no longer believe this.
(head cocks)
"Oh, yes, we have a huge team working on AI misinformation and AI racial bias to avoid incidents like that, that is indeed exactly what AI safety means and we are leaders in the field."
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