When I say I&#x27;m &quot;thinking out loud&quot; what I mean is, the exact words I used may not reflect the underlying point I was getting at, because it was fuzzy in my head when I first started thinking about it.  Reading all of these responses, it&#x27;s clear that most people are responding to something different than the issue I really meant to raise.  Fair enough, that&#x27;s my fault for not being clearer.  But that&#x27;s the value in a discussion, so this whole exercise has been productive (for me at least).<p><i>These are basic questions, the answers are known, published, and the article even mentions exactly where you can find them.</i><p>I&#x27;ve read and re-read TFA and I don&#x27;t find that it addresses the issue I&#x27;m thinking about.  It&#x27;s not so much asking &quot;are we the smartest possible creature&quot;, or even asking if we&#x27;re close to that.   It&#x27;s also not about asking whether or not it&#x27;s possible for a super-AGI to be smarter than humans.<p>The issue I was trying to raise is more of &quot;given how smart humans are (whatever that mean) and given whatever the limit is for how smart a hypothetical super-AGI can be, does the analogy between a super-AGI and a nuclear bomb hold?  That is, does a super-AGI <i>really</i> represent an existential threat?&quot;<p>And again, I&#x27;m not taking a side on this either way.  I honestly haven&#x27;t spent enough time thinking about it.  I will say this though... what I&#x27;ve read on the topic so far (and I haven&#x27;t yet gotten to Bostrom&#x27;s book, to be fair) doesn&#x27;t convince me that this is a settled question.   Maybe after I finish <i>Superintelligence</i> I&#x27;ll feel differently though.   I have it on my shelf waiting to be read anyway, so maybe I&#x27;ll bump it up the priority list a bit and read it over the holiday.