I believe that the author has achieved his goal: he has successfully scared many researchers into paying attention to the existential threat surrounding AI, to the point where AI safety is now a serious field of research in machine learning. The good thing is that if self-aware AI takes a long time to emerge, the first general-purpose AIs will have a fairly limited understanding of the world, and limited computational capabilities. The biggest risk posed by AI, in my opinion, is that it's a tool that can be used to manipulate your life in ways that are useful to those who control the AI.