As a New Zealander we see the same general problems, unaccountable and sclerotic bureaucracy that politicians are finding that they have less and less actual executive control over due to all sorts of inserted regulatory and other mechanisms to restrict govt ability to control them, as well as internal cultures that venerate the in-group bureaucrats consensus on How Things Should Be™ and practice subtle and unsubtle methods of resistance against any outside agency that seeks to change that policy.  What Cummings et al call 'the blob', the US call 'deep state'.

NZ public sector has increased in size by 100% in last 25 years, with population growth of 50% and typical white collar productivity increases around 50% it would be reasonable to expect that same level of government function could be accomplished with around half the current numbers.  Most private sector people I associate with would not say that governance has improved in last 25 years, in fact in many easily viewable metrics it has clearly deteriorated with worse performance in health and education, higher regulatory burdens etc. The cost and lost-productivity costs on NZ (and lost revenue that would arise from those workers paying tax in productive jobs rather than spending it as civil servants) amount to a few % of GDP, and would probably be the difference between the deficits we currently run and having no deficits - a big drain on our future prosperity. 

It's not a new problem, having been an issue ever since the city-state came into being, bureaucrats and people in positions of power will almost always care more about maintaining and growing their power than about providing any utility to others.  UK "Yes Minister" comedy series lampooned it in the 1980's, Parkinson wrote a best selling book on in the 1950's: Parkinson's Law And Other Studies in Administration and Parkinson's Law: Or The Pursuit of Progress, and we even have the term 'Byzantian' to describe excessive bureaucracy from an empire dead for 1000 years.

I would concur that it is absolutely a function of lack of accountability and inability to effectively censure poor performance or subtle intransigence/sabotage of political masters in the public service, and has grown worse with the growth of a distinct self-reinforcing in-group civil service tribalistic identity, perhaps stoked by the homogeneity of elitist educational backgrounds of those that seek government jobs with beliefs that don't mirror or even respect those of the general public they effectively rule over.  And it is creating an extreme crisis in governance in democracies around the world, potentially to the point of violence in Europe as populations get incensed at their electorally signaled preferences being ignored by civil servants with growing social problems that seems to be rising as a result.

"You will never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing" - Thomas Sowell

Guided artillery, like Excalibur with muzzle velocities that can exceed 1000m/s and unit costs of <$100k can be at edge of space in ~30s, perhaps faster than a missile, with ramjet variants (Nammo etc) even faster (up to perhaps 1500m/s) and it would not be that difficult to create a muti-barrel gun system for a few 10's of millions that could fire off 10's of low cost guided rounds in a second (with guidance and detonation signals sent from ground) to detonate when in close proximity to target.

Lasers seems pretty hopeless as a defense given clouds and ablative coatings, unless very high power and located in large numbers in space based constellations.

I think the big problem is if one or more warheads are blown up at limits of interceptor range, to blind or otherwise disable necessarily sensitive interceptor instruments.  following Mirvs don't need to be very accurate with large warheads.

And Mirvs could be very cheaply given random guidance directions during reentry to screw up defenses.

Militarised space is also a big problem.  With cheap and un-monitorable space launch parking 1000 warheads in geostationary orbit (or beyond) will soon be viable for China or USA, and they can be launched in a coordinated way without warning, potentially with radar stealthing features, and give as little as 5-10s from start of re-entry to detonation for every target across the whole world and no way for local systems to know if they are just meteorites.  If subs can be tracked (likely with drones or enough ocean based sensors) then decapitation 1st strikes become viable. 

I also worry about space based lasers as non-nuclear first strike weapons.  A day of over flights from a constellation of multi MW laser weapons that might only cost a few hundred million each - say a few $10's of billions in total (a tiny fraction of annual military budgets) - could see a million fires lit in your country, every transformer taken out, electrical grid and internet gone, powerstations, oil and gas infrastructure wrecked. Bridge trusses melted (wrecked), ships sunk. Most heavy vehicles and locomotives incapacitated and take decades to recover from.   Over a few weeks you could basically send a country back to the 17th century. 

I don't think there will ever be a viable defense to nukes given easy paths to making them tougher, faster, less detectable, and so less and less interceptable.  But every other branch of military tech is getting similarly more lethal and impossible to defend against unless we all start living in caves with geothermal power sources or somesuch the necessity for a harmonious world is going to matter more and more.

My suggesting is to optimize around where you can achieve the most bang for your buck and treat it as a sociological rather than academic problems to solve in terms of building up opposition to AI development.  I am pretty sure that what is needed is not to talk to our social and intellectual peers, but rather focus on it as a numbers game by influencing the young - who are less engaged in the more sophisticated/complex issues of the world , less sure of themselves, more willing to change their views, highly influenced by peer opinion and prone to anxiety.  Modern crusades of all sorts tap into them as their shock troops willing to spend huge amounts of time and energy on promoting various agendas (climate, animal rights, various conflicts, social causes).

As to how to do it - I think identifying a couple of social media influencers with significant reach in the right demographics and paying them to push your concerns 'organically' over an extended period of months, would probably be within your means to do.

If you can start to develop a support base amongst a significant young group and make it a topic of discussion then that could well take on a much outsized political power as it gains notice and popularity amongst peers.  At sufficient scale that is probably the most effective way to achieve the ends of the like of pause.ai.

I don't think alignment is possible over the long long term because there is a fundamental perturbing anti-alignment mechanism; Evolution.

Evolution selects for any changes that produce more of a replicating organism, for ASI that means that any decision, preference or choice by the ASI growing/expanding or replicating itself will tend to be selected for.  Friendly/Aligned ASIs will over time be swamped by those that choose expansion and deprioritize or ignore human flourishing.

Not worth worrying about given context of imminent ASI.

But assuming a Butlerian jihad occurs to make it an issue of importance again then most topics surrounding it are gone into at depth by radical pro-natalists Simone and Malcom Gladwell, who have employed genetic screening of their embryos to attempt to have more high-achievers,  on their near-daily podcast https://www.youtube.com/user/simoneharuko .  While quite odd  in their outlook they delve into all sorts of sociopolitical issues from the pronatalist worldview.  Largely rationalist and very interesting and informative, though well outside of Overton window on a lot of subjects.

Agree that most sociological, economic and environmental problems that loom large in current context will radically shift in importance in next decade or two, to the point that they are probably no longer worth devoting any significant resources to in the present.  Impacts of AI are only issue worth worrying about.  But even assuming utopian outcomes; who gets possession of the Malibu beach houses in post scarcity world?

Once significant white-collar job losses start to mount in a year or two I think it inevitable that a powerful and electorally dominant anti-AI movement will grow, at least in erstwhile democracies, and likely ban most AGI applications outside of a few fields where fewer workers would stand to lose jobs (health - with near endless demand, perhaps cutting edge tech where payoff to human net welfare is highest).  Butlerian Jihad-lite.

It won't save us, and has substantial risk of ushering in repressive authoritarianism in the political ruckus caused but will likely delay our demise or (at best) delivery into powerless pet status by perhaps a decade or two.

This is depressing, but not surprising.  We know the approximate processing power of brains (O(1e16-1e17flops) and how long it takes to train them, and should expect that over the next few years the tricks and structures needed to replicate or exceed that efficiency in ML will be uncovered in an accelerating rush towards the cliff as computational resources needed to attain commercially useful performance continue to fall.  AI Industry can afford to run thousands of experiments at this cost scale.

Within a few years this will likely see AGI implementations on Nvidia B200 level GPUS (~1e16flop).  We have not yet seen hardware application of the various power-reducing computational 'cheats' for mimicking multiplication with reduced gate counts that are likely to see a 2-5x performance gain at same chip size and power draw.

Humans are so screwed.

A very large amount of human problem solving/innovation in challenging areas is creating and evaluating potential solutions, it is a stochastic rather than deterministic process.  My understanding is that our brains are highly parallelized in evaluating ideas in thousands of 'cortical columns' a few mm across (Jeff Hawkin's 1000 brains formulation) with an attention mechanism that promotes the filtered best outputs of those myriad processes forming our 'consciousness'.

So generating and discarding large numbers of solutions within simpler 'sub brains', via iterative, or parallelized operation is very much how I would expect to see AGI and SI develop.

I think Elon will bring strong concern about AI to fore in current executive - he was an early voice for AI safety though he seems too have updated to a more optimistic view (and is pushing development through x-AI) he still generally states P(doom) ~10-20%.  His antipathy towards Altman and Google founders is likely of benefit for AI regulation too - though no answer for the China et al AGI development problem.