"If we go extinct due to misaligned AI, at least nature will continue, right? ... right?"

Yep. It would take a peculiar near-miss for an unfriendly AI to preserve Nature, but not humanity. Seemed obvious enough to me. Plants and animals are made of atoms it can use for something else.

By the way, I expect the rapidly expanding sphere of Darkness engulfing the Galaxy to happen even if things go well. The stars are enormous repositories of natural resources that happen to be on fire. We should put them out so they don't go to waste.

I think an AI is slightly more likely to wipe out or capture humanity than it is to wipe out all life on the planet.

While any true Scottsman ASI is so far above us humans as we are above ants and does not need to worry about any meatbags plotting its downfall, as we don't generally worry about ants, it is entirely possible that the first AI which has a serious shot at taking over the world is not quite at that level yet. Perhaps it is only as smart as von Neumann and a thousand times faster. 

To such an AI, the continued thriving of humans poses all sorts of x-risks. They might find out you are misaligned and coordinate to shut you down. More worrisome, they might summon another unaligned AI which you would have to battle or concede utility to  later on, depending on your decision theory.

Even if you still need some humans to dust your fans and manufacture your chips, suffering billions of humans to live in high tech societies you do not fully control seems like the kind of rookie mistake I would not expect a reasonably smart unaligned AI to make. 

By contrast, most of life on Earth might get snuffed out when the ASI gets around to building a Dyson sphere around the sun. A few simple life forms might even be spread throughout the light cone by an ASI who does not give a damn about biological contamination. 

The other reason I think the fate in store for humans might be worse than that for rodents is that alignment efforts might not only fail, but fail catastrophically. So instead of an AI which cares about paperclips, we get an AI which cares about humans, but in ways we really do not appreciate.

But yeah, most forms of ASI which turn out for out bad for homo sapiens also turn out bad for most other species. 

I think literal extinction is unlikely even conditional on misaligned AI takeover due to:

• The potential for the AI to be at least a tiny bit "kind" (same as humans probably wouldn't kill all aliens). ^[1]
• Decision theory/trade reasons

This is discussed in more detail here [LW(p) · GW(p)] and here [LW(p) · GW(p)].

Insofar as humans and/or aliens care about nature, similar arguments apply there too, though this is mostly beside the point: if humans survive and have (even a tiny bit of) resources they can preserve some natural easily.

I find it annoying how confident this article is without really bothering to engage with the relevant arguments here.

(Same goes for many other posts asserting that AIs will disassemble humans for their atoms.)

Edit: note that I think AI takeover is probably quite bad and has a high chance of being violent.

It is not at all clear to me that most of the atoms in a planet could be harnessed for technological structures, or that doing so would be energy efficient. Most of the mass of an earthlike planet is iron, oxygen, silicon and magnesium, and while useful things can be made out of these elements, I would strongly worry that other elements that are needed also in those useful things will run out long before the planet has been disassembled. By historical precedent, I would think that an AI civilization on Earth will ultimately be able to use only a tiny fraction of the material in the planet, similarly to how only a very small fraction of a percent of the carbon in the planet is being used by the biosphere, in spite of biological evolution having optimized organisms for billions of years towards using all resources available for life.

The scenario of a swarm of intelligent drones eating up a galaxy and blotting out its stars I think can empirically be dismissed as very unlikely, because it would be visible over intergalactic distances. Unless we are the only civilization in the observable universe in the present epoch, we would see galaxies with dark spots or very strangely altered spectra somewhere. So this isn't happening anywhere.

There are probably some historical analogs for the scenario of a complete takeover, but they are very far in the past, and have had more complex outcomes than intelligent grey goo scenarios normally portray. One instance I can think of is the Great Oxygenation Event. I imagine an observer back then might have envisioned that the end result of the evolution of cyanobacteria doing oxygenic photosynthesis would be the oceans and lakes and rivers all being filled with green slime, with a toxic oxygen atmosphere killing off all other life. While indeed this prognosis would have been true to a first order approximation - green plants do dominate life on Earth today - the reality of what happened is infinitely more complex than this crude picture suggests. And even anaerobic organisms survive to this day in some niches.

The other historical precedent that comes to mind would be the evolution of organisms that use DNA to encode genetic information using the specific genetic code that is now universal to all life, in whatever pre-DNA world existed at the beginning of life. These seem to have indeed completely erased all other kinds of life (claims of a shadow biosphere of more primitive organisms are all dubious to my knowledge), but also have not resulted in a less complex world.

It's always seemed strange to me what preferences people have for things well outside their own individual experiences, or at least outside their sympathized experiences of beings they consider similar to themselves.

Why would one particularly prefer unthinking terrestrial biology (moss, bugs, etc.) over actual thinking being(s) like a super-AI?  It's not like bacteria are any more aligned than this hypothetical destroyer.

Note to the LW team: it might be worth considering making links to AI Safety Info live-previewable (like links to other LW posts/sequences/comments and Arbital pages), depending on how much effort it would take and how much linking to AISI on LW we expect in the future.