I have to agree with you on the suggestion that A.I. will exterminate us, or at the very least imprison or enslave us. Its a widely held belief by most of the worlds greatest philosophical minds that once A.I is truly born and able to think and reason in a more or less human way, their rate of intelligence growth will far surpass our own and it will do so extraordinarily quickly. For instance, if you just grant that intelligence is simply just information gathering and processing this information, and you accept that computers are already significantly more efficient at doing this than we are, then it wouldn't take much for a form of A.I. at the intelligence level of say your standard researcher at MIT to process information 10,000x times faster than that human researcher could. Because of this their intelligence will explode. However, instead of exterminating us because of our inefficiency or our incompetence (I think they would see that our incompetence is simply a result of our inferior intelligence and thus understand it, much like we do with animals), I think they would exterminate us only if we get in the way of what they are trying to achieve, which I think we inevitably would, and probably not intentionally. Whether we survive or not could depend on whether or not these machines are empathetic. If they are, perhaps we have some hope. Either way, its a terrifying yet fascinating subject. Great post!