Two 2025 publications, "AI 2027" (Kokotajlo et al., 2025) and "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (Yudkowsky & Soares, 2025), assert that superintelligent artificial intelligence will almost certainly destroy or render humanity obsolete within the next decade. Both rest on the classic chain formulated by Good (1965) and Bostrom (2014): intelligence explosion, superintelligence, lethal misalignment. This article subjects each link to the empirical record of 2023-2025. Sixty years after Good's speculation, none of the required phenomena (sustained recursive self-improvement, autonomous strategic awareness, or intractable lethal misalignment) have been observed. Current generative models remain narrow, statistically trained artefacts: powerful, opaque, and imperfect, but devoid of the properties that would make the catastrophic scenarios plausible. Following Whittaker (2025a, 2025b, 2025c) and Zuboff (2019, 2025), we argue that the existential-risk thesis functions primarily as an ideological distraction from the ongoing consolidation of surveillance capitalism and extreme concentration of computational power. The thesis is further inflated by the 2025 AI speculative bubble, where trillions in investments in rapidly depreciating "digital lettuce" hardware (McWilliams, 2025) mask lagging revenues and jobless growth rather than heralding superintelligence. The thesis remains, in November 2025, a speculative hypothesis amplified by a speculative financial bubble rather than a demonstrated probability.