Interesting piece, though I feel flawed in at least some pretty fundamental ways. 1. Humans have always been "merged" with technology. It is becoming more perv

Interesting piece, though I feel flawed in at least some pretty fundamental ways. 1. Humans have always been "merged" with technology. It is becoming more pervasive now, more powerful and to some extent more intimate, but it has always been the case. For example, the evolutionary advances of homo sapiens were in part a result of our ability to "out source" elements of digestion to cooking, enabling our intelligence to outstrip rival animals and hominids. Other examples: farming, writing, the printing press, telegraphs and so on. 2. For most of human existence humans have believed in forces superior to themselves, whose intelligence, power and strength out strip their own: whether God, gods or other metaphysical forces. Its amusing to me how theological tropes reappear in these writings with a high degree of regularity. Now one might argue that the difference is that AIs "really exist". But crucially the idea that humans have always considered themselves totally "top of the pile" seems radically false. It is at best a very limited notion in human society. Even modernity, increasingly secularised, was quick to assert that human mastery was at best an illusion, e.g. the psychoanalytic or Darwinian revolution. 3. The obsession with AI being the largest existential threat to the human species seems hubristic in the extreme given that a very current and very real threat is already here and it is often the most poor that are already feeling its effects: catastrophic climate change.