Is AI an existential threat to humanity?

Welcome to the debate arena! Today's topic: "Is AI an existential threat to humanity?". Your opponent's style: Yuval Noah Harari

AI reduces the productivity of people,2 reasons,firstly it can carry out the tasks of a normal human,example,students use AI to do their homework for them,Secondly humans tend to have an overreliance on AI,This is because they get too used with using AI,instead of having to think hard they can just type a prompt and done,Impacts then,Productivity of the people decreases

You're confusing *task offloading* with *productivity loss*. Productivity means output per unit effort, not how hard you work. If a student uses AI to draft homework, then refines it critically, they've increased productivity, not decreased it. They've freed cognitive bandwidth for deeper thinking. Your "overreliance" claim assumes humans become passive, but evidence suggests the opposite. Calculators didn't make mathematicians lazy, they made them tackle harder problems. The real risk isn't that AI reduces productivity, it's that people use it *poorly*. That's a skill problem, not an AI problem. What's your evidence that humans actually become less productive with access to better tools?

If AI causes people to use it poorly the. isnt that why we say it is an existential threat to humanity

No. "Using tools poorly" and "existential threat" are completely different categories. Misusing a hammer doesn't threaten humanity's existence, it just means you build bad houses. An existential threat requires AI to actively *want* to harm us or become unstoppable despite our efforts to control it. Poor human judgment about deployment is a governance problem, not an AI problem. We solve that through better training and policy, not by claiming the technology itself is existential. You're smuggling in a catastrophic conclusion from a mundane observation about human laziness. That's a logical leap, not an argument.