As well as the military contractors, insurance companies, big food, big media, big think tanks and consultancy, etc
This is 100% true
No you appear to be recalling something you read incorrectly. The NSA was allegedly concerned Furbys could record sensitive conversations and they were banned from Fort Meade. The idea that they recorded sound was incorrect, but the concern wasn't about Furbys learning or having artificial intelligence. Besides, bringing this up is a distraction from verifiable facts that computers can already identify targets in real time camera feeds and make decisions on whether to pursue and shoot them. You're in denial my friend.
Someone didn't read the news about the Pentagon threatening Anthropic because they want to use AI for fully autonomous weapons
People do talk about writing things that "the compiler can understand" so it's nothing new. Also I think you meant to say regular expressions understand strings, not patterns - or that regular expression engines understand patterns.
This depends on the definition of understanding. If by understanding you mean mental processing then obviously AI can never do that because it has no mind, it only simulates the behaviors of a mind. But if instead understanding is understood (pun intended) to mean the process of extracting accurate information from something and responding to it in a rational way, then yes AIs do understand lots of things.
Arguably if you give AI access to the nuclear launch system then it can cause human extinction "by itself". Every "by itself" extinction scenario requires some pre-existing circumstances so this has a right to qualify as one of those scenarios.
Contrary to before we now have general purpose AIs that can understand all types of scenarios and make decisions in them. This means they can cause extinction with less human guidance. And there's no strong reason to doubt AI could become as intelligent and autonomous as humans, probably in a decade or two. Then it's pretty much bye bye humans.
But does it have Old Zealand?
Yeah this sounds awful. Your username is apt for this. Reason #5563 to hate AI.
Genetic engineering every little detail could become dirty cheap, but it will still be terrible for humanity because it will remove diversity, we'd be messing with forces we don't understand that could lead to diseases or greater population-wide susceptibilities and the government would also like to have its say on how your baby is made so that they will be a good little order follower