they say “well you can’t expect it to be like or treat it like people.” It’s maddening.

Current AI models are 100% static. They do not change, at all. So trying to ascribe any kind of sentience to them or anything going in that direction, makes no sense at all, since the models fundamentally aren't capable of it. They learn patterns from the world and can mush them together in original ways, that's neat and might even be a very important step towards something more human-like, but AI is not people, but that's all they do. They don't think while you aren't looking and they aren't even learning while you are using them. The learning is a complete separate step in these models. Treating them like a person is fundamentally misunderstanding how they work.

But this weird, almost religious devotion to some promise of AI

AI can solve a lot of problems that are unsolvable by any other means. It also has made rapid progress over the last 10 years and seems to continue to do so. So it's not terribly surprising that there is hype about it.

“can we just stop and think about things for a second before we just unleash them on ourselves?“

Problem with that is, if you aren't developing AI right now, the competition will. It's just math. Even if you'd outlaw it, companies would just go to different countries. Technology is hard to stop, especially when it's clearly a superior solution to the alternatives.

Another problem is that "think about things" so far just hasn't been very productive. The problems AI can create are quite real, the solutions on the other side much less so. I do agree with Hinton that we should put way more effort into AI safety research, but at the same time I expect that to just show us more ways in which AI can go wrong, without providing anything to prevent it.

I am not terribly optimistic here, just look at how well we are doing with climate change, which is a much simpler problem with much easier solutions, and we are still not exactly close to actually solving it.