Comments
I think you could say this about any problem. Instead of working on malaria prevention, freeing caged chickens or stopping climate change should we just all switch to working on AI so it can solve the problems for us?
I don't think so, because:
a. I think it's important to hedge bets and try out a range of things in case AI is many decades away or it doesn't work out
and
b. having lots more people working on AI won't necessarily make it come faster or better (already lots of people working on it).
I'd say we already have most of the solutions for climate change, they just need to be implemented (properly). AI could be of help for that, but the fossil fuel lobby could use it just as well, so I'm not sure if it would mean that it gets implemented.
A lot of people, also within EA and 80k hours, are very aware of the advantages that AI can bring. And that is also kind of the problem: there are a lot of incentives for capable AI to be developed quickly, but too little attention is currently paid to the things that can go wrong. 80k is trying to get people to work on making AI safer, hence they focus mainly on the things that can go wrong, instead of promoting and encouraging even faster (and less safe) development of AI.