Alignment has a lot more to it than simply which answers an AI provides. In the future when agents are commonplace and when AI can do things in the physical world, alignment will be especially important because it will dictate how the AI chooses to accomplish the goals humans set out for it. Will it choose to accomplish them in a way that the human requestor does not want and did not anticipate, or will it choose to accomplish them in a way any human with common sense would choose?

Moreover, in the not so distant future if there is an AI that is acting totally autonomous and independent of human requests for long periods of time, weeks or months or longer, and it's doing good important things like medical research or environmental restoration, alignment will be incredibly important to ensure every single independent decision it makes is done in the way its designers would have intended.