Yes, I agree that both problems need to be solved. But I think it's still worth focusing on where we actually are. Lots of people believe that they have a set o

Yes, I agree that both problems need to be solved. But I think it's still worth focusing on where we actually are. Lots of people believe that they have a set of safe values to align an AI to (Musk thinks "curiosity" will work, another commenter in this thread suggested "don't kill humans"), and so those people will think that the alignment problem is trivial: "Just align the AI to these simple, obviously correct principles". But the truth is that it doesn't even matter whether or not they are correct (my personal opinion is that they are not), because we don't know how to align an AI to whatever their preferred values are. It makes it more obvious to more people how hard the problem is.