Shame on all of the people involved in this: the people in these companies, the journalists who shovel shit (hope they get replaced real soon), researchers who should know better, and dementia ridden legislators.
So utterly predictable and slimy. All of those who are so gravely concerned about "alignment" in this context, give yourselves a pat on the back for hyping up science fiction stories and enabling regulatory capture.
Give them a semi human sounding puppet and they think skynet is coming tomorrow.
If we learned anything from the past few months is how gullible people are, wishful thinking is a hell of a drug
To the extent we can get anything like that at all presently, it's going to be people whose competences combine and generalize to cover a complex situation, partially without precedent.
Personally I don't really see that we'll do much better in that regard than a highly intelligent and free-thinking biological psychologist with experience of successfully steering the international ML research community through creating the present technology, and with input from contacts at the forefront of the research field and information overview from Google.
Not even Hinton knows for sure whats going to happen of course, but if you're suggesting his statements are to be discounted because he's not a member of some sort of credentialed trade that are the ones equipped to tell us the future on this matter, I'd sure like to who they supposedly are.