Honest question: isn’t an option for the AI Safety community being just the AI Safety community, independent of there being an EA community?
I understand the idea of the philosophy of effective altruism and longtermism being a motivation to work in AI Safety, but that could as well be a worry about modern ML systems, or just sheer intellectual interest. I don’t know if the current entanglement between both communities is that healthy.
EDIT: Corrected stupid wording mistakes. I wrote in a hurry.
I agree with you insofar as separating AI safety from ML is terrible, since the objective of AI safety, in the end, is not to only study safety but to actually implement it in ML systems, and that can only be done in close communication with the general ML community (and I really enjoyed your analogy with cybersecurity).
I don’t know what is the actual current state of this communication, nor who is working on improving it (although I know people are discussing it), but a thing I want to see at least are alignment papers published in NeurIPS, ICML, JMLR, and so on. My two-cent guess is that this would be easier if AI safety would be more dissociated with EA or even longtermism, although I could easily envision myself being wrong.
EDIT: One point important to clarify is that “more dissociated” does not mean “fully dissociated” here. It may be as well that EA donors support AI safety research, effective altruism as an idea makes people look into AI safety, and so on. My worry is AI safety being seen by a lot of people as “that weird idea coming from EA/rationalist folks”. No matter how fair this view actually is, the point is that AI safety should be popular, non-controversial, if safety techniques are to be adopted en masse (which is the end goal).