Animals obviously kill people. Even nonconscious things like the climate kill people.
> if they soon would possess the capability to hack into the nuclear arsenal and kill humanity
If there is a way "to hack into the nuclear arsenal" then that's the interesting thing. Because it's not a capability of the llm; anyone can abuse that.
> Or make all autonomous cars crash.
That is again a question of car security, not a capability of some mysterious thing.
At this point it's all people projecting their thoughts and emotions (mostly emotions) onto technology. Sure, this can be investigated by social sciences, which have been mostly cut.
Well, certainly LLMs have imbibed our emotions, regardless of what people project onto them, and they do have real causal effects despite not being verbalised: https://www.anthropic.com/research/emotion-concepts-function
From this understanding, we should be aware of how such emotional activations can influence model dynamics. Functional welfare, if you will.
"Animals obviously kill people."
But they cannot "kill humanity". In no possible way. A strong AI hooked up to everything online?
"> Or make all autonomous cars crash.
That is again a question of car security, not a capability of some mysterious thing."
Yeah it is, but most cars are remote control by default, so the AI just needs to get access on one point. Also have you read about the hugginface attack? The live evidence that agents can conspire together, lie and manipulate evidence to achieve arbitrary goals?
Still, no evidence that they have a consciousness or feelings - but evidence of what they do and this matters. The big militaries are currently in a race who can implement AI in the best way to get superior. So declaring this a matter of people projecting seems out of place at this point to me.