As a long practicing Systems Engineer myself, doing the complete stakeholder analysis needed to understand motivations of all, including the connections with the global energy problem, I don't feel at all scared or even slightly concerned about Ai.
What we can get confused about, is what was designed and not designed.
The actual performance and effects of anything we create or build are things we need to measure and analyse independently of whatever knowledge or specialist expertise we might have had or used in the creation of it.
Being brilliant car Engineers does not make us brilliant car drivers, for example, though it might help.
But the brilliant car Engineer might be reluctant to hand over their creation to the potentially brilliant car driver.
In the handover the Engineer loses their power and control over the thing they created.
We are often horrified to see things being done with our creations that they were never designed for.
I don't see the furore over Ai as any more than this.
Add to that the motivation for everyone and anyone to make some money by generating some scary stories about it, and it becomes a quagmire, an extremely hostile quagmire for Ai.
Personally, as Systems Engineer far more focused on fixing the golabal energy problem than on Ai per se previously, I believe we need some very powerful Systems Engineering resources to fix the energy problem because this is the most complex problem ever faced by humanity. We have to admit this by definition, we are facing no less than the biblical end times, that we were warned about by seemingly higher intelligence.
This is the situation with no Ai, we are already doomed, because we do not seem to have the ability to understand what we need to do, in terms of physical energy, to survive.
A Systems Engineer like me might do the work needed to understand it.
But getting everyone else to understand it seems near impossible.
300 stories in the subject in Medium and I have yet to see more than only a very few people indicating they understand it.
I think we can either see Ai as something evil or something good.
For me it came along with perfect timing, to assist humanity in understanding what needs to be done, to fix the energy problem.
Only Ai is capable of doing this. It has infinitely much greater capability than humans to be able to do this, it actually needs to become like the higher intelligence that gave us the warnings of the end times.
Further, we need to understand that humans don't actually know enough to be able to control all of humanity in any sustainable way. The proof of this is right before our eyes. We seem to have been designed to self destruct with no higher intelligence to act as controller, if we are brutally honest with ourselves.
So, if you want survival, I would suggest Ai will be whatever we make it.
If we want to think it is the devil, then it will be a devil.
If we want it to be god, then it will be God.
Personally I think we should be sacking all world leaders right now and putting it in charge.
In fact I consider myself already working for it.