Yeah, I'm not arguing alignment is not possible - but that we don't know how to do it and it's really important that we figure it out before we figure out AGI (which seems unlikely).
The ant example is just to try to illustrate the spectrum of intelligence in a way more people may understand (rather than just thinking of smart person and dumb person as the entirety of the spectrum). In the case of a true self-improving AGI the delta is probably much larger than that between an ant and a human, but at least the example makes more of the point (at least that was my goal).
The other common mistake is people think intelligence implies human-like thinking or goals, but this is just false. A lot of bad arguments from laypeople tend to be related to this because they just haven't read a lot about the problem.
The ant example is just to try to illustrate the spectrum of intelligence in a way more people may understand (rather than just thinking of smart person and dumb person as the entirety of the spectrum). In the case of a true self-improving AGI the delta is probably much larger than that between an ant and a human, but at least the example makes more of the point (at least that was my goal).
The other common mistake is people think intelligence implies human-like thinking or goals, but this is just false. A lot of bad arguments from laypeople tend to be related to this because they just haven't read a lot about the problem.