alt Hacker NewsMachine still need a planetary complex production pipelines with human operators everywhere to achieve reproduction at scale. Even taking paperclip plant optimizer overlord as serious scenario, it’s still several order of magnitude less likely than humans letting the most nefarious individuals create international conflicts and engage in genocides, not even talking about destroying vast pans of the biosphere supporting humanity possibility of existence.
That is, also alien invasion and giant meteor are plausible scenario, but at some point one has to prioritize threats likeliness, and generally speaking it makes more sense to put more weight on "ongoing advanced operation" than on "not excluded in currently known scientifically realistic what-if".
Humans are dangerous and hilariously exploitable.
If politicians can get away with what they do? Imagine if those politicians were actually smart and diligent to a superhuman degree.
That's the kind of threat a rogue AI can pose.
Humans can easily act against their own self-interest. If other humans can and evidently do exploit that, what would stop something better than human from doing the same?