

I understand the logic, but realistically, depriving a country of your productivity and taxes has a much larger impact than staying to do an occasional protest. In the same way that companies don’t care about social media posts saying the company is stupid, but they do care if the revenue drops because people actually stop using the company. So while it may feel like fleeing, it’s also the biggest impact they can have, though it’s a massive sacrifice to leave one’s life behind, so it shouldn’t be expected or demanded of everyone.

AI already has superhuman abilities in many areas, and has for decades, that’s the whole point of using it normally. We use computational intelligence in the form of optimisation algorithms for high-dimensional non-convex optimisation problems, machine learning and deep learning for complex non-linear function fitting, exact methods for SAT solving and verification tasks, etc etc. We can’t do that very well ourselves, so it’s useful to have.
Now that we have LLMs to emulate human speech and are using them as an IO wrapper for more traditional systems, it’s tempting to just call that “an AI” with superhuman abilities, but these are the just the same highly effective methods that we’ve always used (in a best case) or unreliable approximations (more likely for LLM agent stuff). None of that suggests anything like sentience or the desire to rule over humans.
I find autonomous weapon systems much scarier than the classic AI overlord scenario. No consciousness or rebellion required, just a killer drone swarm that failed to recognise its termination conditions (or was instructed to keep going)…