The AI folks, who saw how fast progress was being made, then saw how little attention everyone else was paying. Then they panicked, demanding political urgency, saying they could only be relatable in terms of job loss. However, where I see that there's now some real political action is when Anthropic announced Mythos. Security issues are addressed with greater urgency than welfare issues. That's the society that we are in.
Everyone who actually understands history, technology, the diffusion of innovation, and economics already understands that AI will create more jobs than it displaces.
But mass media and politicians never waste a good fake crisis to terrify people.
And a few very loud, very prominent people in AI were screaming nonsense about the end of all jobs, the same nonsense people once babbled about "computers" in the 80s.
You can still sell a million copies of a crappy book if you want to keep telling that story. People love scary bedtime stories.