Good points (and welcome to Hubski)!

Thanks! Looks like a great community with lots of interesting people.

Yeah, that's precisely the argument. Weak AI is safe and useful, strong AI won't happen anytime soon, so we shouldn't be worried. Sounds reasonable. And yet... it does nothing to address the points that:

P1. Strong AI is not unlikely to be created within the next few decades,

P2. If strong AI is created, it may pose an existential threat,

P3. Creating a safe ("friendly") strong AI seems like it would be surprisingly difficult, and

P4. We should be aware of the dangers, and think long and hard about how we can avoid them.

Note that P1 is a widely-held belief among experts (see Bostrom, chapter 1) so it cannot be dismissed out of hand as "hypothetical." Of course it's hypothetical. So what?

I didn't just come up with the points above. They are central to the argument. And the article does nothing to address them, instead accusing some very smart people (namely Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking) of fear-mongering.

No doubt plenty of people don't understand that present-day AI is safe, and such people ought to be corrected. But not by sweeping the entire issue under the rug.