The alarmism around AI is just a marketing spin.
As @pluralistic@mamot.fr wrote: that’s “mystical nonsense about spontaneous consciousness arising from applied statistics”.
Real problems we face with AI are:
Ghost labor, erosion of the rights of artists, costs of automation, the climate impact of data-centers and the human impact of biased, opaque, incompetent and unfit algorithmic systems.
Even today there are a ton of people who simply seem uncapable of playing out the thought experiment about AGI being more competent than humans at virtually everything. They somehow seem to imagine our current generative AI models somehow being a proof that it can never actually deliver and become what the AI safety people have been worried about for decades.