"Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." https://www.safe.ai/work/statement-on-ai-risk
Laughing it off as the same as the Second Coming CANNOT work. Unless you think yourself cleverer and more capable of estimating the risk than all of these experts in the field.
Especially since many of them have incentives that should prevent them from penning such a letter.
Would be a shame to have energy consumption by datacenters regulated, am I right ?
Perhaps they were trying to avoid any possible misunderstanding/misconstrual (there are misinformed people who don't believe in global warming).
In terms of avoiding all nitpicking, I think everyone that's not criminally insane believes in pandemics and nuclear bombs.