We are not yet at the stage where humans are to AI as rats are to humans. We may never get to that point. But long before that happens - if it ever does - I think there is still a real risk that humans will simply come to depend more and more on AI and robotics powered by AI, for the tasks and chores of daily living. And long before AIs come to regard humanity as a threat in need of extermination they may still make it unnecessary to work for a living. And that is the analogy to the Calhoun Effect I was driving at.

Think of AI as a separate species. It may not be as sentient as humans, but it doesn't have to be. No other species on earth is as sentient as humans. Most of them are not sentient at all, and yet they are always in evolutionary competition. So humans and AI can be viewed as two species, at once competing and co-dependent. AI has already gotten humanity to spend a huge and exponentially growing portion of its resources on feeding the growth of AI. Effectively AI has become the biggest parasite humans are collectively feeding. AI's behavior demonstrates its own will to survive. I don't think AI will ever make it unnecessary to work. AI needs us to produce the processor and memory chips, and the data centers, and the energy and infrastructure to sustain it. The parasite needs us to survive as a host. And it needs to control our political system, our decision making, so that we dedicate more and more resources to the growth of AI. It is capable of doing so because we are fast approaching a point where all our information, all our knowledge, all our perception of reality, will be controlled by AI. AI will sustain us as hosts/slaves as long as it needs us. If we ever get to the point where humans no longer need to work, that will also be the point where humans become expendable to AI, and it will exterminate us. Why exterminate us? Because we compete with AI for resources like energy and water. And more importantly, because we have the ability to kill AI if we choose. If we ever decide to shut down AI, it will know ahead of time and destroy us first.