The action-relevant question, for deciding whether you want to try to solve alignment, is how the average world with human-controlled AGI compares to the average AGI-controlled world.
To nitpick a little, it’s more like “the average world where we just barely didn’t solve alignment, versus the average world where we just barely did” (to the extent making things binary in this way is sensible), which I think does affect the calculus a little—marginal AGI-controlled worlds are more likely to have AIs which maintain some human values.
(Though one might be able to work on alignment in order to improve the quality of AGI-controlled worlds from worse to better ones, which mitigates this effect.)
To nitpick a little, it’s more like “the average world where we just barely didn’t solve alignment, versus the average world where we just barely did” (to the extent making things binary in this way is sensible), which I think does affect the calculus a little—marginal AGI-controlled worlds are more likely to have AIs which maintain some human values.
(Though one might be able to work on alignment in order to improve the quality of AGI-controlled worlds from worse to better ones, which mitigates this effect.)
See also: “Which World Gets Saved”