AI can likely do a fair bit of expensive and annoying damage to IT systems. But kill us all? Nah.
This is bullshit hype by the inflators of the AI bubble, who are desperate to persuade investors that AI can do something sufficiently important as to show a return on the HUGE investment made this far, plus on the additional investments they hope will be made.
They can't point to any plausible route to profit.
But if people believe that AI is hugely dangerous, then they must also believe that it is hugely powerful; And anything that is hugely powerful has the potential to be hugely profitable.
Sadly for them (but fortunately for us) AI is shite at pretty much everything.
Including genocide.
It's not utter shite as a search engine, or as a generator of pictures (and even movies) of stuff that never existed. But where's the money in that?
If you want to kill lots of people, you have to do it the old fashioned way. Which nobody seems to have had too much difficulty doing before AI, and which AI seems pretty inept at doing in a more effective, much less a more profitable, way.
The Tech-bros are like the guy in the pub who is desperately demanding that his mates hold him back, because beneath his drunken bravado he knows that the big bastard he has picked a fight with will wipe the floor with him if they don't.
AI is so tough that if you don't hold us back, everyone will DIE!!
Yeah, sure. AI couldn't fight its way out of a hallucination of a paper bag.
The only thing AI will kill is the economy, when the bubble pops. A lot of blameless people will be out of work, or will see their savings and pension funds evaporate, or both.
And poor old Elon will have to settle for only having a few tens of billions of dollars.
