You may want to define 'put head in the sand in this context'. Any real work in this field is being done not by the people saying 'stop'. Whatever fear is there, it is faced by those in the arena actually getting their hands dirty. What, exactly, are you doing? Throwing roadblocks and calling it productive?

>Any real work in this field is being done not by the people saying 'stop'.

Not exactly, that Evan Hubinger guy from Anthropic famously said his p(doom) is over 10%

See the signatories:

https://aistatement.com/work/statement-on-ai-extinction-risk

https://www.pacingthefrontier.com/

I'm amplifying their calls to reduce the rate of progress

Fair. FWIW, I am not completely against some of the things you say ( you are doing something right ), but I think I mostly picked my path already. GL out there man.