For complex topics on which I do not have deep knowledge E.G. AI Alignment, I find my opinion is easily swayed by any sufficiently well-written, plausible-sounding argument. And so I recognize that I do not have the necessary knowledge and perspective to add value to the discussion and I purposefully avoid making any confident claims on the subject until if and when I decide to dedicate significant effort to closing the inferential distance.

In a similar vein how does Spirulina look? I hear it is very efficient in terms of protein per sq meter per year compared to using the same space to raise grazing animals.

I've had similar experiences. 
For me personally, in cases where:

• The Technical Truth is not my business: go ahead and lie to me and/or omit sensitive details if possible.
• — is a much more complex thing that I likely don't have the foundational understanding to grasp: tell me a portion and then check for comprehension, if I fail that just say some vague 'it's complicated' and give me some ideas of what to study if I really want to know.
• — would probably be disturbing for me to know and I am not likely to be negatively affected by not knowing: You can lie to me or omit some details. Alternatively, ask me what reference classes of things I would want to not be informed about.
• — would be likely to cause significant harm in my hands or the hands of those I would likely tell it to: obviously lie or omit.
   

After reflection, the situations where I would mind being lied to are when my future actions are contaminated by reliance on incorrect data. If the lie will not meaningfully affect my future actions I probably don't care. Although obviously not feasible to accurately predict all possible future actions I might take and why, giving it your best guess is usually sufficient since most conversations are trivial and irrelevant, particularly small talk.
As topic of conversation becomes more consequential, the importance of accuracy also increases.

This seems like a somewhat difficult use case for LLMs. It may be a mistake to think of them as a database of the *entire contents* of the training data. Perhaps instead think of them as compressed amalgamations of the the general patterns in the training data? I'm not terribly surprised that random obscure quotes can get optimized away.

We should have a game where we create a list of interesting questions and then have a few notable writers here answer them, but then also generate some responses from LLMs (with prompts tailored to getting a less-obviously AI response).
Writers would get points for how well they fool people and it has all sorts of fun mind games like 
"This has an AI-smelling mistake, but is it the human faking a mistake they know an AI might make?"

Government is also reliant on its citizens to not violently protest, which would happen if it got to the point you describe.

The idealist in me hopes that eventually those with massive gains in productivity/wealth from automating everything would want to start doing things for the good of humanity™, right? 
...Hopefully that point is long before large scale starvation.

Unfortunately, when dealing with tasks such as software development it is nowhere near as linear as that. 

The meta-tasks of each additional dev needing to be brought up to speed on the intricacies of the project, as well as lost efficiency from poor communication/waiting on others to finish things means you usually get diminishing (or even inverse) returns from adding more people to the project.
See: The Mythical Man Month

I would love to see it happen. It'd be nice to have more stuff in the air removing Co2 and absorbing sunlight. 
I'm curious, what got you thinking of floating algae?

I would estimate the relative difficulty of
[colonizing Himalayan mountain slopes vs free-floating (pelagic?) life at a similar altitude] to that of
[adapting to the salinity of the Great Salt Lake, vs that of the Dead Sea]. The former can support brine shrimp and microorganisms, the latter only microorganisms. Equivalently, the slopes can support simple multicellular life on down, while in the atmosphere we've found bacteria and little else so far.

We know there are particular points at which it is ~impossible for life as we know it to survive e.g. inside the sun, but less extreme absolute lines seem to tempt evolution.

I wonder if sufficient intelligence could distill a formula for estimating likelihood of life adapting to arbitrary parameters in a particular time frame?
Like: "given certain resources and conditions, viable adaptations might form in x [millon/billion] years."^[1]
Then it would simply be a question of "will these conditions last long enough for the adaptation to happen with a high probability?"

1. ^{^}

   But then again, would that require it to brute-force simulate ~all possible mutations for a certain number of steps? And at what point is the simulated life behaviorally indistinguishable from the physical?
   Obviously I'm out of my depth and far from my expertise here but it sure is fun to speculate

While I cannot say that such an organism is impossible, here are a couple obstacles that it would need to overcome:

• Sparse nutrient availability - In the ocean, phytoplankton growth is primarily gated by the available nutrients in the water column (particularly phosphates, nitrates and iron compounds, in addition to oxygen iirc). Air has significantly less capacity to transport nutrients compared to how nutrients in the ocean can be both dissolved in water and present in particulate matter.
• Sub-optimal temperatures - Even at the equator, the atmospheric temperature rapidly drops with altitude, with averages quickly falling below those favorable to most algae.
• What biological mechanism would it use for efficiently staying permanently aloft?
  
  ...Aww hell. Am I starting to write like an LLM or do LLMs these days write like me?
  
  Spanish moss is able to scavenge sufficient nutrients from the air/water without needing direct contact with soil, but it is also useful to note that the water it gets is able to dissolve more nutrients as it comes in contact with tree branches and airborne particles, which are more abundant closer to the ground. I predict it would struggle to do the same even one or two kilometers higher, even if it was warm enough up there (it's not).
  
  It is also notable that many species of algae and moss do use airborne spores to successfully spread themselves around the planet. Spores are typically dormant until certain conditions are met & I do not know of any that grow and actively metabolize while airborne^[1].
  If air, rain, and light were the sole factors at play I would expect to see more things like Spanish moss growing from the ledges of lofty skyscrapers.
  Though a few niche plants have adapted to extremes in elevation and temperature they are the exception rather than the rule and are far less numerous than their more down-to-earth counterparts.
  
  TL;DR: While it is technically possible for highly specialized plants to survive in some of these conditions, it is an unforgiving environment that is less favorable for photosynthetic life.
  Rather than the proverbial low-hanging fruit left untouched, the high-floating fruit has been tasted and found rather cold and bitter for most tastes.
   

I am not an expert, but I have a general familiarity with algae and plant life cycles.

1. ^{^}

   I would love to be wrong here, if they did exist I would still expect them to fly over the radar for a while before humans look closely enough to discover them

Another useful heuristic is that electrical devices that have been UL listed^[1] are typically better quality than ones without. This is particularly relevant for cheap/disposable items like light bulbs where the cheapest ones tend to expire long before the expected lifetime of the actual LED. (I'm looking at you 'bargain' Walmart LEDs that died after less than a year of regular use!)

Note that UL is a for-profit organization. I have never heard anything bad about it but perverse incentives could create conflicts of interest in any number of ways in the future. I hope there is someone monitoring that sort of thing.

1. ^{^}

   Or other organizations that test for standards of quality and/or safety