Now if a new species of humans suddenly emerged with a brain not only has capable as our but faster, more adaptable and extensible, it would disrupt the world.
(In terms of tangible effect on the world today and what seems on track for the few decades to come, AI is still far behind coal - to pick one - when it comes to concrete negative externalities tho)
Suppose (by way of analogy; this is not meant to be directly addressing AI) that in the next year some ingenious physicists finally get quantum gravity figured out, and that soon after the papers are published someone notices that the theory implies that one can use common household materials to make a device capable of destroying a planet.
(Seems unlikely, but I don't think anyone would have predicted that the last revolutionary theory of gravity we worked out would imply that one can use not-so-common materials to make a reasonably small device capable of destroying a city, but it turns out it does.)
It seems fairly likely that (1) the knowledge of how to do this could not be suppressed for ever, and that (2) if making the device turns out not to need all the fancy apparatus and hard-to-get materials that e.g. hydrogen bombs require, it wouldn't be that long before some idiot actually does it and destroys the earth.
And yet, these new discoveries would be "merely an aspect and consequence of the logical progression of that continuity", as you put it.
So, whatever the actual situation is with AI, I think it is demonstrably not the case that we can be confident AI won't somehow kill us all or destroy the world merely because AI is a thing we made and the world has had thousands of years to adapt to us.
Maybe everything will be fine, maybe not, but figuring out which will require looking in more detail rather than handwaving about how ecosystems always adapt.
Saying it’s only going to be as bad as the industrial revolution isn’t a pleasant prediction.