Two things can be true at the same time. I think hardly anyone disagrees that superintelligent AI would be an existential risk. But all the points you point out (I would also add social unrest due to fewer and fewer people able to compete against AI) are huge concerns too, and as you say they're here now.
I didn't realize that the "AI doomers" (people concerned about existential risk) and the "AI ethicists" (people concerned about social effects of AI) are often at odds because they dismiss each others concerns. This makes no sense to me. Both are hugely important problems to be concerned about.
> I think hardly anyone disagrees that superintelligent AI would be an existential risk.
Oh, there's a lot who disagree. I don't really think I understand their worldviews well enough for my attempts to convince them to connect with anything, but I've encountered them even on this site.
Well, I'll tweak my comment a bit then. On one hand you have folks like Ilya Sutskever, who named his new company "Safe Superintelligence", and on the other hand you have folks like Eliezer Yudkowsky, who titled his book "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All". One side believes it's possible to build safe super intelligence, the other side does not. But even the "safe superintelligence" people think there are substantial risks (kind of why they feel the need to add "safe" in the first place, and why they put so much effort into what they call safety and alignment), they just think they can mitigate those risks.
Sure, there may be a few yahoos who think there aren't existential risks, but I think it's easy to discount them. But that's not the same as people who think there are risks but that those risks can be mitigated.
I didn't realize that the "AI doomers" (people concerned about existential risk) and the "AI ethicists" (people concerned about social effects of AI) are often at odds because they dismiss each others concerns. This makes no sense to me. Both are hugely important problems to be concerned about.