Misaligned AI causes extinction and outweighs nuclear war.
Dr. David Denkenberger 20, PhD in Engineering, Assistant Professor at Tennessee State University, with Alexei Turchin, advisory board member at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, contributor at the Science for Life Extension Foundation, “Classification of Global Catastrophic Risks Connected with Artificial Intelligence”, https://philpapers.org/rec/TURCOG-2
According to Yampolskiy (Yampolskiy 2016), the probability and seriousness of AI failures will increase with time. We estimate that they will reach their peak between the appearance of the first self-improving AI and the moment that an AI or group of AIs reach global power, and will later diminish, as late-stage AI halting seems to be a low-probability event.
AI is an extremely powerful and completely unpredictable technology, millions of times more powerful than nuclear weapons. Its existence could create multiple individual global risks, most of which we can't currently imagine. We present several dozen separate global risk scenarios connected with AI in this article, but it is likely that some of the most serious are not included. The sheer number of possible failure modes suggests that there are more to come.