I think the AI-is-going-to-kill-everyone hysteria is absolutely overblown, both by those who believe it, and the media covering them, but one thing that's always bothered me about the counterpoint is that it a common argument is "AI is bad at what we want it to do so how can it be dangerous?"

This imagines that the only way for AI to do serious harm to us (not even in a "kill everyone" sense) is for it to be some super-competent Skynet-level time traveling demigod. I think it's much more likely that if there is some sort of AI calamity resulting in a lot of deaths, it's because the AI just doesn't work very well and ends up breaking all the HVAC systems in a country during a heat wave or something, rather than a singularity-type event where it "decides" to actively start hunting humans.

It'll kill the poor by stealing their jobs and leaving them to die on the streets.

I'm not saying climate change is not a giant problem, I'm saying it's unlikely to eradicate our species.

I believe it is dangerously shortsighted to base AI threat estimation on current self-driving performance; the two fields of advancing AI cognitive abilities and improving selfdriving are not sufficiently connected for that IMO.

We're also putting a lot of focus on system designs that are useful to us, instead of directly building potentially threatening architectures (online learning/longterm memory/direct connection + feedback from physical reality), but those could already be within our grasp technologically (maybe?).

What do you think about the 3 points I raised?

No serious climate projections that I'm aware of even reduce Earth's carrying capacity under 10 billion over the next couple of centuries. While very serious (to the tune of trillions of dollars and tens of millions of excess deaths), it is not an extinction level threat, unlike something that is to us what we are to chimpanzees (humans have made many animals extinct on accident). Does such a thing exist right now? No. Could it exist this century? Maybe.