What am I missing here?
This is wide-scale bike-shedding[1], basically. The real problems our unsustainable civilization faces (population overshoot, energy and fossil fuel shortage, ecological collapse, unsustainable agriculture, climate change, and so on) are between hard to impossible to solve at this point. They're also actually scary to think about.
So instead we talk about the "easy" and trivial stuff first. AI and singularity happen to be a nice kind of scary, because hardly anybody really believes it's a serious threat. It's kind of like watching a scary movie. You get a bit scared, but not too much, because you know there's no real danger.
Once we know for certain than AGI can be developed and it will cause troubles, there's already less developed AIs, generating huge heaps of money for certain companies and they will be heavily lobbying against any kind of regulation. And this won't be just traditional lobbying towards to the elected officials. Just think how powerful a company like Facebook, but equipped with more advanced AI could be at altering the public opinion if it decides to go all in and use all the powers it has.