One shot extinction? Seems unlikely. "A lot of damage" - more likely. The most likely damage comes from the associated societal chaos that comes along with tim

One shot extinction? Seems unlikely. "A lot of damage" - more likely. The most likely damage comes from the associated societal chaos that comes along with times of significant social change (such as many people losing their jobs). Revolutions and civil wars within or between nuclear powers would be dangerous. After that, pick your sci-fi story and run with it. AI is a really smart, really fast 'while' loop, and most of the direct damage it could cause would come from us connecting things to the Internet that shouldn't be connected in the first place. Hacking HuggingFace was a bummer. Imagine a rogue agent simultaneously hacking a bunch of farm equipment and ruining some percentage of the world's crops in a day. That alone isn't going to extinct everyone, but it sure accelerates the 'social unrest' scenario. Or taking control of the unsecured SCADA controls for a bunch of a some foreign nation's industrial plant and running them into the ground. It's likely that such system have long been sitting on some nation state's "first strike" list if it ever came to blows. An AI could simulate that attack in a day, and we'd be at war - just like War Games. Doesn't need to be nukes, just enough mis-information and damage to spark humans into doing unfortunate things. At the end of the day, it really comes down to us. We've been able to wipe ourselves out for some time. I rather hope we continue to not do so.