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I don't think this makes sense. You don't have to be a materialist to believe that AI is capable of surpassing human capabilities in all strategically relevant respects. It may very well be that only creatures with non-material souls can have qualia, but AI doesn't need qualia to destroy the world, and it certainly doesn't need qualia to wreck the economy in a mundane sense where it doesn't even go rogue.
You'd have to be not only a non-materialist, but someone who believes that the soul is doing a lot of the 'thinking' in a practical sense, for this to be otherwise - and I don't think that's a mainstream opinion even among dualists. But even then - even if you believe that a material machine can never replicate what happens in a human's mind when the human thinks about a problem, this is no guarantee that the AI can't arrive at a functional answer by different, possibly more efficient means.
I agree, except that if you start with the assumption that one doesn't yet know what the capabilities of AI are, then one rationally ought to keep space for skepticism of doomsday scenarios.
But you're right, and I don't assume that trouble isn't coming; I just saw the obvious other explanation for the talk of vulnerability-finding AI and determined based on how people were behaving that hype was the more likely explanation, this time. And I think that fear is primarily driven by the materialism of our times.
After all, when people talk about artificial intelligence replacing humans, the unstated premise is that humans are really just computers or not much better. See how easily they can do what humans can do? Haven't they passed the Turing Test?
Obviously, this is an attempt at mind reading, but I think it is a better explanation than marketing. As a marketing strategy, intentionally making promises that will obviously be falsified and talked about widely when the product is released seems silly.
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