You are confusing multiple people making multiple different arguments, and those people your are talking about often aren't articulate enough about their ideas.

There are many mutually independent opinions about AI from IT crowd.

- AI is extremely useful for many individuals.

- AI is extremely damaging to our society as a whole.

- AI companies possibly may be (or at least were) deep in red and possibly would require bailing out.

- AI is not going anywhere.

- A person can use AI extensively AND genuinely hate it and forecast general economic slump because of it at the same time.

And likely many other ideas in the same vein. And by the way, I'm not here saying that I'm anywhere good about describing the issues about AI, those items above are just some examples to illustrate the scope of opinions.

My point is that you can't just take one single argument from a big group of people, deconstruct it (correctly or incorrectly, it doesn't matter) and then claim that ALL arguments of such big group of people are false. It's not a constructive dialog.

PS: also despite the accusations of goal-post shifting, a vast majority of opinions here on HN didn't actually change over the past few years.