Could you give me some examples of other people and organizations trying to prevent the risk of an Unfriendy AI? Because for me, it's not like I believe that SI has a great chance to develop the theory and prevent the danger, but rather like they are the only people who even care about this specific risk (which I believe to be real).
As soon as the message becomes widely known, and smart people and organizations will start rationally discussing the dangers of Unfriendly AI, and how to make a Friendly AI (avoiding some obvious errors, such as "a smart AI simply must develop a human-compatible morality, because it would be too horrible to think otherwise"), then there is a pretty good chance that some of those organization will be more capable than SI to reach that goal: more smart people, better funding, etc. But at this moment, SI seems to be the only one paying attention to this topic.
SI being the only one ought to lower your probability that this whole enterprise is worthwhile in any way.
With regards to the 'message', i think you grossly over estimate value of a rather easy insight that anyone who has watched Terminator could have. With regards to "rationally discussing", what I have seen so far here is pure rationalization and very little, if any, rationality. What the SI has on the track record is, once again, a lot of rationalizations and not enough rationality to even have had an accountant through it's first 10 years and first over 2 millions dollars in other people's money.
Nick Szabo on acting on extremely long odds with claimed high payoffs:
Beware of what I call Pascal's scams: movements or belief systems that ask you to hope for or worry about very improbable outcomes that could have very large positive or negative consequences. (The name comes of course from the infinite-reward Wager proposed by Pascal: these days the large-but-finite versions are far more pernicious). Naive expected value reasoning implies that they are worth the effort: if the odds are 1 in 1,000 that I could win $1 billion, and I am risk and time neutral, then I should expend up to nearly $1 million dollars worth of effort to gain this boon. The problems with these beliefs tend to be at least threefold, all stemming from the general uncertainty, i.e. the poor information or lack of information, from which we abstracted the low probability estimate in the first place: because in the messy real world the low probability estimate is almost always due to low or poor evidence rather than being a lottery with well-defined odds.
Nick clarifies in the comments that he is indeed talking about singularitarians, including his GMU colleague Robin Hanson. This post appears to revisit a comment on an earlier post:
In other words, just because one comes up with quasi-plausible catastrophic scenarios does not put the burden of proof on the skeptics to debunk them or else cough up substantial funds to supposedly combat these alleged threats.