It seems to me that when normal people are concerned about AI destroying their life, they are mostly worried about technological unemployment, whereas rationalists think that it is a bigger risk that the AI might murder us all, and that automation gives humans more wealth and free time and is therefore good.

I'm not entirely unsympathetic to the rationalist position here. If we had a plan for how to use AI to create a utopia where humanity could thrive, I'd be all for it. We have problems (like death) that we are quite far from solving, and which it seems like a superintelligence could in principle quickly solve.

But this requires value alignment: we need to be quite careful what we mean by concepts like "humanity", "thrive", etc., so the AI can explicitly maintain good conditions. What kinds of humans do we want, and what kinds of thriving should [...]

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