AI Apocalypse: What should I know as a programmer? [on hold]

"The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I'm not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast-it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don't understand.

I am not alone in thinking we should be worried. The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. The recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen..." - Elon Musk

Above is the original Elon Musk's controversial predication (conspiracy theory?) and it is not just one. Here is another example:

"Hope we're not just the biological boot loader for digital superintelligence. Unfortunately, that is increasingly probable" - Elon Musk

Since he is publicly speaking about his concerns, however with no evidence or proof at all, I'm thinking if he is right, then what should I know and do as a programmer?

Are we talking about a scenario in which some enormous resources will be used against humanity? Let say Google (which now has both DeepMind and Boston Dynamics) tries to take control over the world? Or is it more of a worm, but a smart worm that can learn, thus can come up with new destructive plans and can protect itself against new threats?

Would it be a case of human efforts that will, for example, provide the necessary exploits for the worm to compromise new machines? Or it will be smart enough to for example, download the Linux kernel source code, analyze it, find a vulnerability and write the shell-code for it, and then effectively use it to improve its abilities?

As a programmer who doesn't have any direct or indirect exposure to any of those companies, should I leave the subject to people like Elon Musk, Google and politicians? If no, then what should I know and what should I do?