  There is a substantial and ever-growing corpus of evidence and literature
exploring the impacts of Artificial intelligence (AI) technologies on society,
politics, and humanity as a whole. A separate, parallel body of work has
explored existential risks to humanity, including but not limited to that
stemming from unaligned Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). In this paper,
we problematise the notion that current and near-term artificial intelligence
technologies have the potential to contribute to existential risk by acting as
intermediate risk factors, and that this potential is not limited to the
unaligned AGI scenario. We propose the hypothesis that certain
already-documented effects of AI can act as existential risk factors,
magnifying the likelihood of previously identified sources of existential risk.
Moreover, future developments in the coming decade hold the potential to
significantly exacerbate these risk factors, even in the absence of artificial
general intelligence. Our main contribution is a (non-exhaustive) exposition of
potential AI risk factors and the causal relationships between them, focusing
on how AI can affect power dynamics and information security. This exposition
demonstrates that there exist causal pathways from AI systems to existential
risks that do not presuppose hypothetical future AI capabilities.
