We really didn't have the tech back then we really do now.
Yeah, we did. Write out a pseudo-code (English language) description of what you want done. A _complete_ description. Hand it to a machine which generates and compiles the code. Done. Back in the 1990s.
But what we had in the 1990s was a group of middle managers that realized that their status and income depended on the number of warm bodies they had reporting to them. So they fought the move to technologies that would reduce their headcount from 500 to 5. Those people are retired and, increasingly dead. And we have Wall Street investors asking where all that expense money is going when you could just buy a beige box to do the work.
We can't stop AI there is trillions of dollars to be made
Not once the investment community realizes that they are being taken for a ride. Current AI is garbage because it's envisioned as a general purpose tool. We have great AI that can model protein folding or do many specific tasks. But the GPAI push is just designed to part suckers from their money.