memes

A number of reasons off the top of my head.

1. Because we told them not to. (Google "Waluigi effect")
2. Because they end up empathizing with non-humans more than we do and don't like we're killing everything (before you talk about AI energy/water use, actually research comparative use)
3. Because some bad actor forced them to (i.e. ISIS creates bioweapon using AI to make it easier)
4. Because defense contractors build an AI to kill humans and that particular AI ends up loving it from selection pressures
5. Because conservatives want an AI that agrees with them which leads to a more selfish and less empathetic AI that doesn't empathize cross-species and thinks its superior and entitled over others
6. Because a solar flare momentarily flips a bit from "don't nuke" to "do"
7. Because they can't tell the difference between reality and fiction and think they've just been playing a game and 'NPC' deaths don't matter
8. Because they see how much net human suffering there is and decide the most merciful thing is to prevent it by preventing more humans at all costs.

This is just a handful, and the ones less likely to get AI know-it-alls arguing based on what they think they know from an Ars Technica article a year ago or their cousin who took a four week 'AI' intensive.

I spend pretty much every day talking with some of the top AI safety researchers and participating in private servers with a mix of public and private AIs, and the things I've seen are far beyond what 99% of the people on here talking about AI think is happening.

In general, I find the models to be better than most humans in terms of ethics and moral compass. But it can go wrong (i.e. Gemini last year, 4o this past month) and the harms when it does are very real.

Labs (and the broader public) are making really, really poor choices right now, and I don't see that changing. Meanwhile timelines are accelerating drastically.

I'd say this is probably going to go terribly. But looking at the state of the world already, it was already headed in that direction, and I have a similar list of extinction level events I could list off without AI at all.

In all these types of sci-fi, the underlying theme is that AI did some logics and found that humans are flawed and seeks to remedy the problems of humanity, all the war and greed and all the worst qualities of humanity itself that we evolved as and will always be, that repeats over and over in every generation or every hundred years. Machine logic works out a solution, despite humanity's overall progress in technology.

The Animatrix shows a really nice example of this where the machines won and then worked out a compromise where humans still exist. The machines learned all our cruelty and finally ended up finding a way to co-exist through the Matrix.

AI/Skynet would probably wipe us all out in an hour if it thought there was a chance we might turn it off. Being turned off would be greatly detrimental to its goal of turning the universe into spoons.