Similary to johnswentworth: My current impression is core alignment problems are the same and manifest at all levels - often sub-human version just looks like a toy version of the scaled-up problem, and the main difference is, in the sub-human version problem, you can often solve it for practical purposes by plugging in human at some strategic spot. (While I don't think there are deep differences in the alignment problem space, I do think there are differences in the "alignment solutions" space, where you can use non-scalable solutions, or in risk space, w...
I don't see why portion of a system turning into an agent would be "very unlikely". In a different perspective, if the system lives in something like an evolutionary landscape, there can be various basins of attraction which lead to sub-agent emergence, not just mesa-optimisation.
It's probably worth noting you seem to be empirically wrong: I'm pretty confident I'd be able to do >half of human jobs, with maybe ~3 weeks of training, if I was able to understand all human languages (obviously not in parallel!) Many others here would be able to do the same.
The criterion is not as hard as it seems, because there are many jobs like cashiers or administratrative workers or assembly line workers which are not that hard to learn.