Musk, Hawking, et al. are not talking about deep neural nets that do well on MNIST, but what will be possible 20-50 years down the road. There are very real concerns about AI and it's annoying to see them just dismissed by calling people "neo-luddites".

>But instead on focusing on doing the actual work that would get us to these machine 'thugs' or at least promoting more research in that direction most prefer to sit in their armchair and argue to the death the hypothetical T-1000

There has been more investment in AI in the last 5 years than in the 50 years before it. Even Musk invested millions to AI research.