These articles/letters seem to just say "this is an important issue and I really hope someone else solves it!" and feel like passing the buck to me. Maybe it's

These articles/letters seem to just say "this is an important issue and I really hope someone else solves it!" and feel like passing the buck to me. Maybe it's more defensible from a journalist/author, but even that recent prominent letter didn't have any concrete suggestions and just called on other people to solve things. I know there are people working on AI safety, but that's been going on for a while and it seems like the state of the art is to just think of things that we hope the AI doesn't do and then we tweak it to be unlikely to do it? It seems like we don't even know what to ask for when it comes to AI safety so people just ask for dialog/debate. So I'm starting to feel cynical about our ability to actually achieve any of the safety that people wish for. This has been a known issue for a while, and despite a lot of awareness we haven't really made much progress on it. I'm not sure what to do with this -- personally I feel a bit fatalistic that AI will continue unabated and we won't figure out the safety angle. But I just think the conversation should move on from "we really need to talk about this" because people certainly have been talking about it.