> The idea of replacing human life with AI isn't exactly controversial in the realm of futurism.
It isn't in Science Fiction. But this is reality, and in this reality we do not have AGI and we have no idea of how far we are away from it. And even if and when it happens there is absolutely no guarantee that that will lead to the extinction of the human race and/or us ending up as slaves to the machine.
Yep! Just like climate change. It's chilly where I live right now, scientists don't all agree about climate change projections, and even if temperatures actually rise it won't lead to the extinction of the human race, so let's not worry about it.
Edit: /s because I would make me mad if even a few people thought I was being serious.
You don't need AGI to do a lot of harm with AI. I'm reminded of a piece of malware that used Instagram comments to encode the instructions it was using to communicate with its control server [1]. This is rudimentary software that any script kiddie could devise with a bit of social engineering. Neural nets / deep learning of today could scale this to the point where it's undetectable.
It isn't in Science Fiction. But this is reality, and in this reality we do not have AGI and we have no idea of how far we are away from it. And even if and when it happens there is absolutely no guarantee that that will lead to the extinction of the human race and/or us ending up as slaves to the machine.