There is literally no evidence that this is the scale of the matter. Has AI ever caused anything to go extinct? Where did this hypothesis (and that's all it is) come from? Terminator movies?
It's very frustrating watching experts and the literal founder of lesswrong reacting to pure make believe. There is no disernable/convincing path from GPT4 -> Human Extinction. What am I missing here?
The path is pretty clear to me. An AI that can recreate an improved version of itself will cause an intelligence explosion. That is a mathematical tautology though it could turn out that it would plateau at some point due to physical limitations or whatever. And the situation then becomes: at some point, this AI will be smarter than us. And so, if it decides that we are in the way for one reason or another, it can decide to get rid of us and we would have as much chance of stopping it as chimpanzees would of stopping us if we decided to kill them off.
We do not, I think, have such a thing at this point but it doesn't feel far off with the coding capabilities that GPT4 has.
We know from human history that intelligence tends to cause extinctions.
AI just hasn't been around long enough, nor been intelligent enough yet.
Though, if you count corporations as artificial intelligences, as some suggest, then yes, AIs have in fact already contributed to extinctions.