I'm a wildly pro-AI dude, but the idea that this is an existential threat makes me think one thing: "you consume too much dystopian content."

A lot of things could be an existential threat, nuclear weapons, bio-weapons, climate change, the end of the Flynn effect, cratering birth rates, whatever.

You can always pick out a particularly dystopian vision of the future if you're so inclined. The doom narrative is sells ad revenue, so it's a huge amount of what we all consume online, but it's not really that mapped out to reality...

Somethings get worse, some things get better, in general, the average QoL for the average human is getting better. If we decide not to go to global thermonuclear war, or we decide to unplug any killer AIs that we invent, we'll probably be ok. If we can reduce the population to 3,000-ish humans after the Toba eruption, we can probably survive whatever self-imposed calamities we can create.

I think there's something particularly noxious about the present nihilism trend I see in a lot of this doom themed content. People should go outside and touch grass.