> Humans don't harbor a particular ill-will towards ants, but if we become interested in some (orthogonal) goal like building a basement for a house, we might along the way destroy some ant colonies. When human-level intelligence arrived and went about its business, it led to the extinction of quite a few species.
I would argue that the goals of human beings are almost entirely orthogonal to the goals of ants whenever we come in contact. But this isn't a fair comparison. Human beings and their intelligence didn't emerge from the complex interactions and structures created by billions of ants. We evolved completely separately, shaped by hundreds of millions of years of different evolutionary pressures, including competition for resources (albeit at different scales). When we destroy ant hills it's because we're competing for space with a species we differentiated from hundreds of millions of years ago and now exists in a completely different ecological niche than we do.
A more fair comparison would be likening AI (and all automata + the internet) to the cerebral cortex of the mammalian (human) brain and human beings to the brainstem. Human beings are ancient, robust and necessary for all basic functionality of the organism ("humanity" as a whole). We are responsible for homeostatic regulation as well as fundamental, reactive survival instincts and processes. We make "emotional", visceral assessments of situations and react before higher-order systems are able to even assess the complexity of the problem. Further growth and development of "humanity" as an organism selected for the growth of the cerebral cortex (automata) to assess, interpret and manage more complex internal and external interactions. This allows the humanity (the organism) to be more robust and self-sufficient.
Viewed through this lens, a developmental pattern that would lead to an existential crisis for human beings seems unlikely at best and, for the most part, extremely improbable. We may not be able to individually predict how AI will develop, but we can make some educated guesses based on comparisons to emergent systems we've already seen in nature - and I think "ants vs. humans" is just poor pattern matching. :)