Religious fanatics believe that coming off the messiah is inevitable. You don't have any more evidence than they do. This belief that general AI will show up soon and change the world is nothing more than a secular religion.
As for the inevitability of general purpose AI, that's not an unfounded religious belief based on nonsense from the ignorant, it's an obvious and practical step that will be taken because there's every reason to believe it's possible and no reason to believe brains are magical and intelligence isn't achievable, and tons of the smartest people in the world are actively trying to do it. Informed and logical predictions are nothing like superstition and to say there's no evidence is just willful blindness.
People have been saying the exact same thing about fusion, and it's always "20 years away", but we're no closer to having fusion power than we were 40 years ago.
Maybe you're right, and it will all work itself out. Some huge growth industry to which humans are uniquely (at least at first) well suited may spring up in the next couple years. But the crisis is awfully close (taking into account driving occupations alone), and there's no market solution in sight, so it seems like prime time to start looking for non-market solutions.
That's just not true, it's just that every time the AI crowd makes something really cool and it becomes used, we stop calling it AI because it doesn't think like we do.
> People have been saying the exact same thing about fusion, and it's always "20 years away", but we're no closer to having fusion power than we were 40 years ago.
That's also not true. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITER
So, sorry, you can call it "progress" if you want, but there's no evidence that it's going to work as planned until they actually can demonstrate it doing so.