AI hype and Oppenheimer

I am reading these AI doomsday scenarios (or commentary along the lines that AGI is already here), and I can’t stop pondering — all this hype is obviously driven from the need to generate bigger deals, and thus more intense pyramid schemes. But underneath it looks to me that the protagonists share a deep need to be part of some kind of Faustian deal; unleash the daemon, get that tragic poet girlfriend, be the destroyer of worlds.

My take is that we are a merchant civilisation and no longer able to even express desires that are not directly linked to quarterly profits. The whole hype cycle will end soon, and, as in previous hype cycles, there will be some very useful leftovers, and we will move on.