Locking in values in that way would be considered a failure of alignment by anyone I've ever read talk about alignment. Not the worst possible failure of alignment (compared to locking in “the value of the entity legally known as OpenAI”, for example), but definitely a straightforward failure to achieve alignment.

I know it's a theme, MacAskill discusess it in his book. In practice, this is the direction all the "AI safety" departments and organisations seem to be going into.

A world where everyone is paperclipped is probably better than one controlled by psychopathic totalitarian human overlords supported by AI, yet the direction of current research seems to leading us into the latter scenario.

Are you serious? Paperclipped means the end of the human race. Why would you prefer that over anything?

No, I don’t think they do, which is another point in the “alignment is a very big problem” column.

The problem of defining “what’s a good outcome” is a sub problem of alignment.

I think the worry with the vision of AI under the control of who ever happens to want to use them is that someday that might be the equivalent of giving everyone the keys to a nuclear silo. We know the universe makes it easier to destroy than to create and we know that AI may unleash tremendous power and there's nothing we've seen about the world that means it's guaranteed to stay nice and stable

If anything it’ll be a subtle bug that wipes us out.

The 2003 Northeast blackout that affected 50 million people was partially caused by a race condition. https://www.theregister.com/2004/04/08/blackout_bug_report/

If they think what they're working on is as bad as nuclear weapons, then why are they even working on it?

Don't nuclear weapons kinda cause ssomething like this ? At least the blocks that have the become effectively impossible to destroy & can better spread their ideology.