I agree with most of this, but you're misunderstanding "alignment" as coined. Yes, training powerful enough AI, any simple optimization target gets you malign behavior, because human values are not simple. If you insist on making powerful AI, you'd better instill respect for human values! That's "alignment".
How do you do that in the current paradigm other than creating yet another gameable metric? And something I didn't mention above is that there is no difference between "solving the task" and "optimizing the metric" for an ML model, even though there clearly is for us. So it's not clear to me how you "fix" something that is baked into the architecture. All I'm saying is "instilling respect for human values" is not something that can actually be done via a cost function. In no small part because we humans probably don't even agree on those values, let alone on a single metric with which to quantify and "optimize" them.
For example, we agree that "merit" is valuable and that we should reward "merit." But to reward it we have to quantify it, and what metric should we use? Raw SAT score to get into college? But that also captures socioeconomic factors that unfairly penalize some and reward others. We generally agree that those who provide more value should earn more money, but what does that look like? Do we all agree on what activities are or should be valuable, or on how they should be rewarded? Until recently, I thought we all agreed that "empathy" was a human value, but a lot of people in this space, who are making these decisions unilaterally for all of us, don't apparently share that belief.
Yes! There's both the daunting problem of technically how can we even do this, and the broader problems of what's good/acceptable and how do we resolve that among each other.
I believe this mismatch of rates of progress means we need to stop slamming the accelerator on capabilities for now even though as a libertarian I'm sure whatever governance process we manage to get to will be, uh... suboptimal.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZxWzCGKzX84S7DBZ9/when-was-t...