I don’t know if AI is a pressing threat but the slow march towards general intelligence is actually pretty incredible to witness. A year ago I would have found it hard to believe something like chatGPT could exist in my lifetime, now it’s rather easy to visualize what it’s doing in that “word predictor” as something very close to abstractions similar to what humans do. It feels like all that needs to happen at this point is the spontaneous eruption of a meta hypervisor that would “think” about what those abstractions are and boom you have consciousness. All of it doesn’t seem impossible anymore. After all, humans evolved a brain under the same physical universal constraints and with the same set of initial building blocks.