I suspect there’s a type of deep, thorough, precise understanding that one person (the intervener) can have of another person (the intervened), which makes it so that the intervener can confront the intervened with something like “If you and people you know succeed at what you’re trying to do, everyone will die.”, and the intervened can hear this.
+1 to this being possible, but really really hard, even when the goal is to intervene on just one specific person.
A further complication is that enough people have to hear this message, such that there is not a large enough group of “holdouts” left with the means and inclination to press on anyway. The size and resources of such a holdout group required to pose an existential threat to humanity, even when most others have correctly understood the danger, gets back to the question of timelines, the absolute difficulty of inventing AGI, the difficulty of inventing AGI relative to aligning it, and the willingness / ability of non-holdouts to impose effective restrictions backed by credible enforcement.
+1 to this being possible, but really really hard, even when the goal is to intervene on just one specific person.
A further complication is that enough people have to hear this message, such that there is not a large enough group of “holdouts” left with the means and inclination to press on anyway. The size and resources of such a holdout group required to pose an existential threat to humanity, even when most others have correctly understood the danger, gets back to the question of timelines, the absolute difficulty of inventing AGI, the difficulty of inventing AGI relative to aligning it, and the willingness / ability of non-holdouts to impose effective restrictions backed by credible enforcement.