[pjc50]

It's weird given that there are real civilization level threats: climate change, hostile unintelligent self-replicating human-hosted biological threats (diseases), nuclear war, and so on.

"How do we prevent AI destroying us?" is not as useful a question as "how do we prevent us destroying us?"

[TeMPOraL]

Unfriendly AI is one of such existential problems. Maybe further out in the future that the ones you mentioned, but with side effect of possibly taking the whole universe down with us if we get it wrong. And there will be people trying to pursue strong AI for various reasons, including help in fixing all the previous threats you mentioned.