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.

You're assuming AI is an existential threat because it's powerful and we can't fully predict it. That's backwards. The real existential threats are ones we've already normalized, ignore, or profit from. Nuclear weapons, biotech, climate collapse, pandemic pathogens. We lived through those without extinction. Why? Because existential risk requires both capability and intent. AI has neither. It's a tool without goals, preferences, or survival instinct. We control its training, deployment, and power. The apocalypse narratives distract from actual governance problems: bias, concentration, labor disruption. Those are solvable. But they're boring compared to sci-fi dread. So what specific mechanism makes AI fundamentally different from other dangerous technologies we've already managed?

AI is capable of taking over jobs as it evolves. As it goes on for more and more years, it becomes smarter. In the future, there is a real possibility that there are few jobs remaining for humans; making them lazy, weak, and dependent on AI. However animals aren't dependent on AI, if people become incapable of surviving on their own from wild beast or nature without AI then we might as well be extinct.

You're conflating three separate problems and calling it extinction. Job displacement isn't extinction, dependency isn't extinction, and losing wilderness survival skills definitely isn't extinction. Humans stopped hunting mammoths 4,000 years ago. We didn't go extinct. We specialized. Your real fear is social collapse from inequality, not AI itself. That's a policy problem, not a technological one. Universal basic income, education reform, wealth distribution. Solvable. And "animals aren't dependent on AI" is meaningless—they're dependent on ecosystems we've already decimated. If survival depends on hand-to-hand combat with bears, we're already extinct by your standard. You're describing unemployment anxiety dressed up as existential threat. What actually kills humanity in your scenario?