Ask HN: Your thoughts on people being worried about AI killing us

I see lots of discussions about this and it just never makes sense to me. From what I understand, today's AI is basically just stupidly effective pattern recognition, allowing it to appear intelligent.

I don't see how we could get from there to it killing us. For it to do so, it would, I assume, need to be conscious. And as far as I know, the science doesn't have an answer for what consciousness is. Like we know all the "how"s, how our brains work, but we don't know why. So I can't really see how we could make a machine conscious.

Thoughts?