>I think the most likely way to achieve “AI alignment” is the peasants with crossbows. Everyone having a powerful AI at their fingertips provides a balancing factor that is only overcome if those tools are in the hands of very few.

I think neither elite actors like Sam Altman nor the peasants will manage to get their AI to do what they want it to do once the AI becomes knowledgeable enough and good enough at planning to make plans resistant to determined human opposition.

I.e., I think inequality is a distraction from the main problem with frontier AI research.