However, in their defense, the real question is whether those types of problems are something this new class of AI could potentially excel at. I've been an AI skeptic for decades, having had real world industry experience trying to get it to solve problems, and this is the first technological advance that has actually surprised me with its capabilities.
AI Risk still doesn't rank above many current, pressing global problems for me personally, but it also doesn't seem ridiculous anymore.
Now consider that a computer program can replicate and change itself orders of magnitude faster than a human generation.
I've dealt with spaghetti systems that need such maintenance and I'm unconvinced that poor devops is a major barrier to the hypothetical of runaway AI. Devops people will probably be using AI to fix these issues soon enough if they aren't already.
I think in this case it's a false premise though. There are plenty of real practitioners like Joshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton who have sounded the alarm on these topics, and no one can call them inexperienced with real systems.
It's unfalsifiable, too.
The idea that people like Geof Hinton are wrong because they don't understand SRE is pretty arrogant. SRE skills are relatively straightforward vs AI theory.