Religion itself does a lot of hand waving, and people tend to talk about the &quot;existential threat&quot; of AI with a lot of hand waving. Its an easy comparison to make. Also, a claim, by itself, can&#x27;t be a religion. It would need people to attach to it with a certain fervor.<p>&gt;it doesn&#x27;t distinguish between what AI can do right now, and what the theoretical limit of AI is, in 50 or 100 or 500 years.<p>AI, by itself, cannot interact with the physical world, past bit-flipping registers on a cpu (a negligible action). For AI to be a threat, in my opinion, it would need to be coupled with some form of physical manifestation that could, in some fashion, not be under the control of a human. Until that happens, we can just unplug the machine. And we are already seeing the intense difficulty of robotics, making good robots, and interfacing with the real world. Historically, everything with AI is much, much harder than originally thought.