[dmitrybrant]

In the case of Putin, are you seriously asking "Why are these leaders frightening people..."?

But seriously, people whom we might call "visionaries" like Musk, Zuckerberg, and let's throw Ray Kurzweil in there, often get their ideas by extrapolating the current state of technology into its logical next phase. (They also like to be grossly aggressive on deadlines, to motivate their employees to be innovative and efficient.)

Unfortunately a simple extrapolation doesn't always produce an idea that is attainable in practice. We will not have human-level AI anytime soon. We're still many years away from driverless cars. An AI that cares about the politics of nation-states (to which we can confidently hand over the nuclear codes) is much farther away than that. But none of that actually matters, because a single tweet from these leaders can cause a flurry of activity and interest that can lead to an unexpected product idea. So, while it's ethically dubious, I see this as being a mostly positive thing.