Agency Failure AI Apocalypse?

Years ago my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky and I argued here on this blog about his AI risk fear than an AI so small dumb & weak that few had ever heard of it, might without warning, suddenly “foom”, i.e., innovate very fast, and take over the world after one weekend. I mostly argued that we have a huge literature on economic growth at odds with this. Historically, the vast majority of innovation has been small, incremental, and spread across many industries and locations. Yes, humans mostly displaced other pre-human species, as such species can’t share innovations well. But since then sharing and complementing of innovations has allowed most of the world to gain from even the biggest lumpiest innovations ever seen. Eliezer said a deep conceptual analysis allowed him to see that this time is different.