There isn't necessarily such a dichotomy in the AI Safety field (though I feel like some people in that field do have similar all-or-nothing viewpoints).
A central belief of many AI researchers is that violently unaligned AGI is as realistic as current bad-in-a-socially-familiar-way AIs. It just seems more unrealistic because we've never experienced it before, and it's only existed in fiction. (Eg, the threat of nuclear anihilation would probably have sounded incredibly fanciful to someone in the 19th century)
So a lot of AI safety researchers will agree that, yes, we should worry about oppressive use of AI by government, but claim that government is only one of the many pathways through which an unaligned AGI could manifest. And not only that, that any open-source AI strong enough to compete against an unaligned AGI would likely be opaque and its alignment brittle enough that it would be an unreliable ally anyway.
A central belief of many AI researchers is that violently unaligned AGI is as realistic as current bad-in-a-socially-familiar-way AIs. It just seems more unrealistic because we've never experienced it before, and it's only existed in fiction. (Eg, the threat of nuclear anihilation would probably have sounded incredibly fanciful to someone in the 19th century)
So a lot of AI safety researchers will agree that, yes, we should worry about oppressive use of AI by government, but claim that government is only one of the many pathways through which an unaligned AGI could manifest. And not only that, that any open-source AI strong enough to compete against an unaligned AGI would likely be opaque and its alignment brittle enough that it would be an unreliable ally anyway.