Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just like with absolutely any other tool, their value is in what it enables humans using them to accomplish. E.g., a hammer doesn't do anything, and neither does a lawnmower. It would be silly to argue (just because these tools are static objects doing nothing in the absence of direct human involvement) that those tools don't have a very clear value.
Seems equally silly to me to suggest that hammers and lawnmowers don't do anything, but I mean here we are. When people use other people like tools, i.e. use them to enable themselves to accomplish something, do those people cease to do things as well? Or is that not a terminology you recognize as sensible maybe? I appreciate that for some people the verb "do" is evidently human(?) exclusive, I just struggle to wrap…
To put my comment in context again: I replied to a comment that said "By that logic, nothing computers do is scary." as a response to "Why would it be scary? Claude is just parroting other human knowledge. It has no goal or agency.". I was following the train of "logic" of this chain of comments.
As long as this hypothetical Claude doesn't have control over objects, it cannot do anything. It completely depends on how its output is processed and received. An LLM spits out words, a computer ultimately spits out bits; what makes them "scary" is not what they produce, but fully depends how that product is translated into action by its environment. It cannot be determined in isolation by only looking at the computer/LLM ("mind") part.
The mind part does not do. A computer may be attributed to have "agency", but the "objects" around it can have agency too. A computer cannot force anything on its own; a toddler (or a president) may have agency, but they require cooperation by their environment to exercise that agency. If you break a leg, you can want to move it all you want, it won't do.
It's not merely a "linguistic semantics thing". Think Nuremberg trials. Who is responsible, in a network of 'autonomous agents'?