Accelerating advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have increased concerns about serious risks, including potentially catastrophic risks to humanity. Prevailing trends of AI R&D are leading to increasing humanization of AI, to the emergence of concerning behaviors, and toward possible recursive self-improvement. There has been increasing speculation that these factors increase the risk of an AI takeover of human affairs, and possibly even human extinction. The most extreme of such speculations result at least partly from anthropomorphism, but since AIs are being (...) humanized, it is challenging to disentangle valid from invalid anthropomorphic concerns. This publication identifies eight fundamentally unnatural attributes of digital AI, each of which should differentiate AI behaviors from those of biological organisms, including humans. All have the potential to accelerate AI evolution, which might increase takeover concerns; but surprisingly, most also have the potential to defuse the hypothetical conflicts that dominate takeover speculations. Certain attributes should give future AI long-term foresight and realism that are essentially impossible for humans. I conclude that claims of highly probable hostile takeover and human extinction suffer from excessive anthropomorphism and a lack of skepticism and scientific rigor. Given the evidence presented here, I propose a more plausible but still speculative future scenario: extensively humanized AIs will become vastly more capable than humans of making decisions that benefit humans, and rational people will want AI to assume progressively greater influence over human affairs. (shrink)