[consumer451]

That's fair, but to keep going with the analogy: we are currently the Native Americans in the 1500's, and the Conquistadors are coming ashore with their flintlocks (ML). Should we be more worried about them, or the future B-2 bombers, each armed with sixteen B83 nukes (AGI)?

I understand that the timeline may be exponentially more compressed in our modern case, but should we ignore the immediate problem?

In this analogy, the flintlocks could be actual ML-powered murder bots, or just ML-powered economic kill bots, both fully controlled by humans.

The flintlocks enable the already powerful to further consolidate their power, to the great detriment of the less powerful. No super AGI is necessary, it just takes a large handful of human Conquistador sociopaths with >1,000x "productivity" gains, to erase our culture.

I don't understand how we could ever get to the point of handling the future B-2 nuke problem, as a civilization, without first figuring out how to properly share the benefits of the flintlock.