> AI doesn't exist. It is a marketing term used by grifters to sell their snake oil.

They've claimed the term, this is not a useful objection to make at this point. And everyone was fine with calling our shitty little computer vision handwriting parsers "AI algorithms" before LLMs.

> We've somehow been able to do this for nuclear weapons which can literally obliterate civilization at the press of a button

Knowing what you know about nuclear weapons, if you ran into the Manhattan Project scientists, would you still be cheering them on? "Thanks guys, our democracies are so stable these will literally never be used for a nuclear holocaust, and they might have useful mining applications!"

Can you not think of any exceptionally nasty things the US government could do with the "machines that act as if they can think for most practical purposes"? Do you think maybe it might be a good idea to develop that technology after you have made sure that the government serves the peoples interest?