[SpicyLemonZest]

There has been a big push by major AI companies to focus on "safety", which they understand to refer to the novel types of harm that a powerful AI model might cause.

It's true that some people are confident there's no such novelty, and it's impossible for an AI system to cause a problem which can't be analyzed within the frameworks we've developed for human misbehavior. Some of those people do say that if you don't agree with them it must be because of "eugenics". But both of these positions make so little sense to me that I'm not sure how to engage with them.

[bo1024]

Your second paragraph doesn't match the dialogue around the topic that I've encountered.

I generally agree with your first paragraph. My summary of the critique on "safety vs ethics" is that the push to focus on "novel" types of harm has come with dismissing and glossing over of AI reproducing and amplifying existing harms. These are well documented in machine learning from the pre-LLM era (e.g. books like Weapons of Math Destruction).