> Why do people eat artificially sweetened things? Why do people use birth control? Why do people watch pornography? Why do people do drugs? Why do people play video games? Why do people watch moving lights and pictures? These are all symptoms of humans being misaligned.

I think these behaviors are fully aligned with natural selection. Why do we overengineer our food? It's not for health, because simpler food would satisfy our nutritional needs as easily, it's because our far ancestors developed a taste for food that kept them alive longer. Our incredibly complex chain of meal preparation is just us looking to satisfy that desire for tasty food by overloading it as much as possible.

People prefer artificial sweeteners because they taste sweeter than regular ones, they use birth control because we inherently enjoy sex and want more of it (but not more raising babies), drugs are an overloading of our need for hapiness, etc. Our bodies crave for things, and uninformed, we give them what they want but multiplied several fold.

But geez, I agree, alignment of AI is a hard problem, but it would be wrong to say it's impossible, at least until it's understood better.

It seems like you don’t understand reinforcement learning. The signal is reinforced because it correlates to behavior, hacking the signal itself is misalignment.