You describe the arguments of AI safety advocates as being handwavey and lacking rigor. Do you believe you have arguments for why AI safety should not be a concern that are more rigorous? If not, do you think there's a reason why we should privilege your position?
Most of the arguments I've heard from you are arguments that AI is going to progress slowly. I haven't heard arguments from AI safety advocates that AI will progress quickly, so I'm not sure there is a disagreement. I've heard arguments that AI may progress quickly, but a few anecdotes about instances of slow progress strike me as a pretty handwavey/non-rigorous response. I could just as easily provide anecdotes of unexpectedly quick progress (e.g. AIs able to beat humans at Go arrived ~10 years ahead of schedule). Note that the claim you are going for is a substantially stronger one than the one I hear from AI safety folks: you're saying that we can be confident that things will play out in one particular way, and AI safety people say that we should be prepared for the possibility that things play out in a variety of different ways.
FWIW, I'm pretty sure Bostrom's thinking on AI predates Less Wrong by quite a bit.
There have been a few attempts to reach out to broader audiences in the past, but mostly in very politically/ideologically loaded topics.
After seeing several examples of how little understanding people have about the difficulties in creating a friendly AI, I'm horrified. And I'm not even talking about a farmer on some hidden ranch, but about people who should know about these things, researchers, software developers meddling with AI research, and so on.
What made me write this post, was a highly voted answer on stackexchange.com, which claims that the danger of superhuman AI is a non-issue, and that the only way for an AI to wipe out humanity is if "some insane human wanted that, and told the AI to find a way to do it". And the poster claims to be working in the AI field.
I've also seen a TEDx talk about AIs. The talker didn't even hear about the paperclip maximizer, and the talk was about the dangers presented by the AIs as depicted in the movies, like the Terminator, where an AI "rebels", but we can hope that AIs would not rebel as they cannot feel emotion, so we should hope the events depicted in such movies will not happen, and all we have to do is for ourselves to be ethical and not deliberately write malicious AI, and then everything will be OK.
The sheer and mind-boggling stupidity of this makes me want to scream.
We should find a way to increase public awareness of the difficulty of the problem. The paperclip maximizer should become part of public consciousness, a part of pop culture. Whenever there is a relevant discussion about the topic, we should mention it. We should increase awareness of old fairy tales with a jinn who misinterprets wishes. Whatever it takes to ingrain the importance of these problems into public consciousness.
There are many people graduating every year who've never heard about these problems. Or if they did, they dismiss it as a non-issue, a contradictory thought experiment which can be dismissed without a second though:
We don't want our future AI researches to start working with such a mentality.
What can we do to raise awareness? We don't have the funding to make a movie which becomes a cult classic. We might start downvoting and commenting on the aforementioned stackexchange post, but that would not solve much if anything.