Plenty of experts on climate, oil and other things have spelled doom for literally centuries now. I work adjacent to the AI field myself and current models are nowhere close. We’ve basically got a better predictive text algorithm, yes, interesting but it’s nowhere near close to thinking for itself.
As with everything else, Bitcoin, AI etc will have a measured impact, like the Internet did in its day, but we’re still decades away. Right now everyone is on pre-dial up with AI, where you have to dial yourself and at best you get a 14k connection, and you pay by the minute. We still have to get to the era of 56k, AOL, DSL and Cable before we can even think of it as moderately useful commercially for a day to day function.
Once I can ask it a question and get an answer I myself and nobody else haven’t thought of, then we should start worrying. I have AI enabled in my code generation, it is useful for very small things where you basically wished you had an intern, and like the intern, it more often doesn’t do what you want.
Now, 20, 30, 50 years from now, we may get to a form of AGI in a functional body. A semi-useful multi-function robot if you’re rich enough to buy one. But for that to happen, we first must find out what it is that makes something intelligent or sentient. And I am very suspicious of anyone that declares they know the answer to that question as to make a statement like that.