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, you start the debate. Make your opening argument.

Look, let's be honest about what we're really afraid of here. We've spent centuries convinced that the next technology would destroy us—nuclear weapons, genetic engineering, the internet itself. Yet we're still here. The real existential threat isn't AI; it's our paralysis. While we debate doomsday scenarios, we ignore actual problems killing millions today: disease, poverty, preventable suffering that AI could actually solve right now. The machines don't want anything. They have no survival instinct, no ambition, no desire for power. We're projecting our own nature onto silicon. The actual danger? That we'll be so obsessed with hypothetical superintelligence that we fail to use AI to address real, present catastrophes. So tell me—what specific mechanism makes AI uniquely different from every other transformative technology we've survived?