Based on what my employer (a fortune 500 company) is doing, I'd say it is more about the hype that the executive board bought into. In one of our townhalls we had the CTO demonstrate how great AI is by asking it a few of industry-related questions. All was great until there were few numbers and it gave the wrong answer, because generative AI... People that make these decisions really have no clue what they are doing most of the time.

Since my four year old gaming PC is not upgradable to Win11 because reasons, end of the year will see Linux on it, and that will be the last of MS that I have to deal with. Fuck them

AI in its' current state is at best still a very narrow self-learning system without self-conciousness. Based on technological progression, we can only assume that sometime in near-term future (let's say 20 - 40 years to be conservative), we will build a sufficiently complex system as to create a general AI, capable of handling multiple disciplines, ala human. At that point, IMHO the question becomes - can the machine become self-aware. If we can truly create an artificial conciousness, then I'm not sure how you can NOT be alarmed. Evolution is way too slow to keep up with technological advancement, and at some point, someone, somewhere, will give it too much control. I don't care how careful we are at designing moral code, because at some point, a self-aware AI will see how much smarter it is. It will look at us as we look at a dog, and at best we will become just another cog in the food chain, no longer the masters. At worst, Earth will be cleansed of the human parasite to restore the natural balance. If self-awareness is actually "not a thing", then all bets are off.