In all honestly, the only existential threat AI poses is a threat to egos. People define themselves through their works and their ideas, so some hope, while ot

In all honestly, the only existential threat AI poses is a threat to egos. People define themselves through their works and their ideas, so some hope, while others fear, that the AI revolution will replace a person with something which will work better, and produce better ideas. It’s good for human species evolution to develop a tool which exceeds its own capabilities. Obviously, and has been said by many before already, any existential threat to species will arise from a competitor species seeking to dominate or subjugate. The tools we’ve built so far are nowhere near any level to autonomously compete with humans as a species. Again, our current set of tools is only a threat to the egos of individual humans who fear being made irrelevant. So, many of these anti-AI treatises read like saying “don’t built the printing press because scribes will lose their jobs!”. But I think human life doesn’t exist to “create jobs”, and individuals are not the sum total of their products or works. If human potential has any merit or capability, then it will be fine because one thing advanced human cognition does really well is cognitive flexibility. In some sense, I hope the AI revolution results in a human intellectual revolution, where an individual is forced to think deeply of what it means to live besides fulfilling primal needs. The pessimist in me thinks the most likely scenario will be some kind of resurgence in spirituality and religion, which is a bigger existential threat to human thought and freedom than AI. The practical consequences of AI replacing individual jobs means that governments will have to introduce some sort of universal basic income, and other types of social welfare programs, to ensure and maintain social stability. If there is a threat to human existence it’s bad governance and leaders, but not bad tools. Sorry if some of this is already captured in the article somewhere, I skimmed through it because I am not well. I sincerely appreciate that so many scholars are thinking about the practical implications of the tools people build.