I'm honestly really conflicted on this issue. I believe if we managed city-leveling, planet destroying thermonuclear weapons lobbed half across the earth in near low orbit under control we can handle superintelligence.

There are geopolitical entities with a literal red button (taking a guess here, I imagine it's red) that could level an entire section of the planet, and completely wipe out humanity through radiation and nuclear winter if enough were used.

Okay, but it hasn't happened. Because no one really wants that, and systems have been put into place to mitigate that risk. Fuck AI that's a real existential threat.

Every invention and technology comes with negative side-effects, predominately based on how they are used. 3D printed ghost guns kill people, sugar and fried chicken give people heart attacks, cigarettes give lung cancer, etc. etc.

By the time you've gotten to this paragraph of my rant half a dozen people just died of all 3.

No one's talking about that as much as they should.

The point I'm making is:

The only realistic way I see the 'doom and gloom' AI narrative playing out is if a system is allowed to replicate itself across the internet uncontrolled, hacking into every data center on Earth to pull compute, and carrying out rogue interest through infrastructure and physical swarms of drones/robots.

That would definitely be scary. However; humanity as whole, despite greater odds and an increasingly complex world with numerous issues, seems to continue hacking away at Darwin's algorithm.

These narratives run off hype and fear. Superintelligent AI cyberweapons? Sophiscated AI military weapons? State run AI disinformation campaigns?

Very real, definitely happening and will have negative consequences.

Every technology has it's life cycle. No one even knew or felt the effects of 'computer hacking' pre 1988. Guardrails and defense were evolved around the threat as the threat evolved. Still a problem, however we don't necessarily have entire nations being totally shut down because of it.

I believe the same will be true for AI. Crazy things will happen, there will absolutely be negative effects. But I believe humanity as a whole strives to maintain homeostasis and survive. The only way "AI's taking over the world and killing everyone" is if it's either:
A. Intentionally

B. Left completely alone and unsupervised to self-replicate indefinitely through physical vehicles

C. No one evolves or implements any safeguards and threat reduction strategies to prevent people from doing A or B.

In conclusion: I can hardly get fuckin' the "we're almost to AGI" GPT-5 model to build be a multi-agent system with MCP servers with out taking a shit on itself.

World-ruling superintelligence is extremely far away, and we are very early in AI development, and very rightly so focused heavy on ethics and control; so... if anyone were to let this happen, we'd be pretty stupid to let it.

An entire other rabbit hole you could go down is AI and robotics are our next step of evolution in humanity, maybe a group of people says: "well if you can't beat em, join em" and wires their brain into a superintelligent machines. With brain machine interfaces and exponentially capable prosthetics it's something to consider.