It sounds to me as though you believe that <i>because</i> religious nuts have prophesied doomsday since forever, we can rule out any doomsday scenario as &quot;almost certainly false&quot; (a very confident statement! Prediction is difficult, especially about the future. Weren&#x27;t you just explaining how hard it is to predict these things?)  But no actions on the part of religious doomsayers are going to protect us from a real doomsday-type scenario if the universe throws one at us.<p>The fact that a claim bears superficial resemblance to one made by wackos might be a reason for you to believe that it&#x27;s most likely not worth investigating, but as soon as you spend more than a few minutes thinking about a claim, the weight of superficial resemblances is going to be overwhelmed by other data.  If I have been talking to someone for three hours, and my major data point for inferring what they are like as a person is what clothes they are wearing, I am doing conversation wrong.<p>&quot;Nuclear weapons are fundamentally different from every other doomsday scenario I cited because they were designed explicitly and solely as weapons whose purpose was to wreak massive destruction at a huge cost to human life. The potential to destroy humanity defined nuclear weapons. That is not the case for other technological, demographic and resource-related doomsday scenarios, which are much more tenuous.&quot;<p>Sure, and in the same way nuclear bombs were a weaponization of physics research, there will be some way to weaponize AI research.