AI is infusing our daily lives. Is it an existential threat?

As AI is being subtly melded into our daily lives by the Google, Apple, and Microsoft clouds there is continuing debate over whether it is or Isn’t an existential threat. This debate has been brought to a head by the sudden and unexpected firing of Open AI’s chief executive Sam Altman and has starkly exposed the philosophical rift in the AI community between those who are more or less concerned about the potential risks of its untrammeled development. How many, if any, guardrails should be in place?. I have been on the techno-optimists side of this debate and passed on Marc Andreesen's rather extreme and overstated SubStack post titled "Why AI Will Save the World" in a June 23 MindBlog post. I was then completely horrified by his subsequent piece by this ideologist of the Silicon Valley elite titled "Fighting", which took a very positive view of Elon Musk challenging Mark Zuckerbert to a cage fight. I was going to write a piece on his dystopian future world, but two NYTimes pieces have done a better job at it than I could. They are Elizabeth Spiers "A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World" and Ezra Klein's "The Chief Ideologist of the Silicon Valley Elite Has Some Strange Ideas".