Most of that concern was in fiction. Non theoretical, genuine concern about AI is pretty recent, maybe dating back to 2010 ish with the rationalist types.

But also no one trusts anyone involved in AI safety now, I think, because they are all seemingly in bed with these big companies. And there is the perpetual argument "if we aren't pushing AI forward China will and then we don't have any control" and so on.

(I don't use any of these tools - my experience is limited to prodding at copilot at work and seeing Gemini summaries on Google. So it doesn't seem to me like it's getting exponentially better at everything yet. People are always saying the latest model is finally the big step that made it useful and life changing and they have been since 2024 ish. So if the situation is really bad, we should turn it all off, sure. I won't lose anything from it going away and I think life would be a little better without models writing all these posts and websites and needing extra compute.)