the people developing them were headed by people motivated by reasons other than extracting as much money out of the world at any cost.

I mean... they were developing an information tool that could survive a nuclear strike. One of the ironies of the modern internet is how its become so heavily centralized and interdependent that it no longer fulfills any of the original functions of the system.

Pushback against non-generative AI, such as self-driving cars, is general fatigue at being sold something not fit to task and being told that calling it out is being against a hypothetical future.

One could argue the same of the original internet. The Web1 tools were largely decentralized and difficult to navigate, but robust and resilient in the face of regional outages. Web2 went the opposite direction, engaging in heavy centralization under a handful of mega-firms and their Walled Garden of services. The promise of Web3 was supposed to be a return to fully decentralized network, but it just ended up being even more boutique fee-for-service Walled Gardens.

Modern internet is horribly expensive, inefficient, and vulnerable to outages at an international scale. Convenience has become obligation (always-on DRM, endless system updates, tighter and tighter obsolescence timelines). Interface has become surveillance (everything with a mic or a camera is used to spy on us). Communication has become commodity (constant data scraping, compiling, and trading of human interactions).

AI is all this on steroids.