I think that the reaction would be wildly different if there were trust that such a technology would be used to make everyone's lives better. If workers were collectively in charge of deciding how AI ought to change their working lives, I suspect most of them would have opted for reduced working hours & longer weekends over what we are currently seeing.

AI could have revolutionized how many people do their work. It could have given so many people the freedom to spend their lives living, but somehow we used it to make work more intense and more taxing than it ever was before. And we all know that with each leap forward, things invariably get worse for us.