> I find it chilling to imagine the possibility that any inevitable successful AGI would require humans to first destroy themselves.

That's not the chilling thing. The chilling thing is there are people (mainly sci-fi addled software engineers) who would consciously choose to destroy humanity in order to create an AGI. It's like they read about paperclip maximizers, and decided to become one for <insert-scifi-concept-here-usually-agi>.