[FeepingCreature]

The world we live in is the result of a gray goo scenario causing a global genocide. (Google Oxygen Holocaust.) So it kinda makes a poor argument that sudden global ecosystem collapses are impossible. That said, everything we have in natural biotech, while advanced, are incremental improvements on the initial chemical replicators that arose in a hydrothermal vent billions of years ago. Evolution has massive path dependence; if there was a better way to build a cell from the ground up, but it required one too many incremental steps that were individually nonviable, evolution would never find it. (Example: 3.7 billion years of evolution, and zero animals with a wheel-and-axle!) So the biosphere we have isn't very strong evidence that there isn't an invasive species of non-DNA-based replicators waiting in our future.

That said, if I was an ASI and I wanted to kill every human, I wouldn't make nanotech, I'd mod a new Covid strain that waits a few months and then synthesizes botox. Humans are not safe in the presence of a sufficiently smart adversary. (As with playing against Magnus Carlsen, you don't know how you lose, but you know that you will.)

[lupire]

So the AGI holocaust would be a good thing for the advancement of life, like the Oxygen Holocaust was.

Anyway, the Oxygen Holocaust took over 300,000,000 years. Not quite "sudden".

[FeepingCreature]

As I understand the Wikipedia article, nobody quite knows why it took that long, but one hypothesis is that the oxygen being produced also killed the organisms producing it, causing a balance until evolution caught up. This will presumably not be an issue for AI-produced nanoswarms.

[Qwertious]

We don't care about the advancement of life, we care about the advancement of people.