I agree that other smart humans can be a threat, but globally they are a resource. I couldn’t build the internet, and I didn’t get money from it being built, but my life is better because someone (many someones) smarter than me built it. In the direct competition of who has more money, that doesn’t help me, but in the global struggle to survive and find fulfillment, it does.
In that way, AI will be about as threatening as a very intelligent human, which is to say that while it will probably put me out of my day job, on net it will make life better.
James, I’m not saying no argument works, I’m saying that the arguments you’ve actually presented doesn’t work. Your argument seems to be that monkeys can’t make predictions, but then you, fellow monkey that you are, made a prediction. Your position is as prediction-dependent as mine, and so your argument that we can’t perfectly predict things we don’t understand cuts both ways.
If instead you want to argue that monkeys specifically have had a rough go of it, and therefore we will have a rough go of it, I would say that’s a poor analogy, and at it’s strongest a single data point against which it’s possible to provide many that make the opposite point. Dogs had it much worse before they partnered with much more intelligent humans. Neanderthals interbred with the superior Sapiens. And so-called ‘centaurs’, human-machine pairs, are currently the best chess players in the world. There are examples of more intelligent things coming along and improving the outcomes of less intelligent things, so we need to ask what kind of situation we’re in with respect to superintelligent AI. One reason to think we’re in the optimistic case is that humans are currently organized in a vast, complex, and powerful global network that marshals incredible processing power to solve all kinds of problems, and a superintelligence won’t be easily able to supplant that system due to the embodied nature of consciousness.
So while your snark is cute, it will not substitute for actually grappling with the argument I’m presenting.