Earlier quoted context omitted.
Could you provide some examples of tools which are not inherently abusable? I can't think of any.
I think the point is more like: consider how often a gun is abused vs. a blanket. Surely it's not a stretch to conclude that the former enables unethical acts far more than the latter.
I'm not disagreeing with the idea that "artifacts have politics" [0], but rather pointing out that focusing solely on the negative actions enabled by guns is fallacious. In fact, the development of firearms is historically seen as having democratized power. It's just that most of what we consider the positive effects have been incorporated into the framework of our society, while we continue trying to diminish the negative ones.
Now having said that, so far "AI" (really ML) is primarily being wielded by large centralized entities against individuals. A less-equipped defending army does not particularly benefit from having a few drones with facial recognition, as their human soldiers are under attack regardless. Whereas it does enable a much larger conquering army to further insulate itself from the results of war.
Even relatively benign uses like voice recognition or recommendations have become excuses to retain large surveillance datasets on our entire society, and to shape the development so results favor large centralizing entities rather than their supposed users - eg the common engagement metric of "human time wasted".
But are the ethical issues the result of "AI" technology itself, or better attributed to the larger system its deployed upon? On the consumer side, I would say that the fundamental ethical problem is that software is not under its users control. If the majority of training sets were being accumulated voluntarily, with the goal of developing applications that actually helped users, then I think the ethical landscape would look quite different.
[0] If you don't recognize the reference, search it.
