I didn't say all technological development would be halted, just that tech "in many fields" would have to be stalled for safety (AI development, algorithm development that would reduce the cost of training models, etc)> Naturally if AI is considered an existential threat there would be a huge safety radius for things that would allow bad-actors to train AI models.

The problem is that if someone is right about an existential disaster caused by AI, by the time they're proven right it would be too late.

Frontier AI models get smarter every year, humans but humans don't get any smarter year over year. If you don't believe that somehow AI will just suddenly stop getting better (which is as much a faith-based gamble as assuming some rapturous outcome for AI by default), then you'd have to assume that at some point AI will surpass human intelligence in all fields, and the keep going. In that case human minds and overall will will be onconsequential compared to that of AI.