Remember this is a bunch of academics that were saying that Millennium problems were at least a decade away from being solved, only to be proved wrong in less than 18 months.
>but civilization only has so many modes of catastrophic failure.
Correct, but this number is also unbound. If you have an even moderately accepted proof by the scientific community I'll be glad to read it.
> It is "grown" is a meaningless term, because what do you even mean by that?
>And I see no evidence that AI (outside of the marketing hype) is as dangerous as Nuclear technology.
See, humans are generally in agreement that nuclear is dangerous, so they in general take is really seriously, especially when things are purified (well, the Russians are not great here). We can't even get people to agree that SOTA models are as dangerous as a single human, much less their capabilities when used in mass with out safety filters.
It's kind of funny we're blind to this when humans love touting "The pen is mightier than the sword". I can only assume any AI danger denier does not believe this statement.