I watched a 4 hour podcast from the excellent "From First Principles" guys* that affected my thinking on this. For the first time I feel like we actually are on that precipice.
It differs from the nuclear bomb in that it will be harder to regulate and it will be incredibly difficult to keep out of reach of bad actors. It's just code and data. Somebody is gonna take that code and make the next version of it. Lots of people, in fact. Compute resources improve and proliferate orders of magnitude faster than uranium enrichment facilities.
But I think those technologies are also linked in that the only surefire scenario I can envision where AI kills us all before we can pull the plug is launching nukes. So in that more technical sense let's just start by making sure they can't do that. The killer virus epidemic is another one to watch, and they touch on Anthropic's biolab in the pod. That one seems less instantaneously existential, but also more distributed.
It's basically going to be about...how do we secure everything in the presence of a swarm of actors with poorly-understood capabilities? We kinda have to disable and disconnect and just remove things that can be used against us from the equation (a la BSG).