I don't get this line of logic -- of course software has safety implications, because people use it for things in the real world. It isn't "math' that is cleanly separable from the rest of humanity; its training data comes from humanity, and it will be used towards human goals. AI is entangled with the rest of human dealings.

Whether AI poses existential threats for us or not, I'm open to either direction, but that the experts (e.g. Hinton, LeCun) are divided is reason enough to be concerned.