I found this old video from Tom Scott and it seems like a rather good short dystopian introduction into the potential dangers of misalignment. Unlike other beginner resources, it makes no attempts as to explain technical terms or to give a comprehensive overview. Instead, Tom Scott simply describes a dystopian world and how a simple machine with a misaligned reward function can cause havoc from nothing very quickly.

Quite a few themes are touched upon namely extraordinarily vast growth in intelligence in short time spans, the perils of dealing with super-intelligence, the need for AI safety roles and oversight and the difficulty in setting goals.

Give it a watch and perhaps past it along the next time someone else is curious!

Bill