AI Is Both the Coolest and Scariest Thing I’ve Ever Used. Is it normal to feel like that?

Lately I’ve been trying to figure out how I actually feel about AI. On one hand, I keep hearing people like Yuval Harari, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Sam Harris, etc., saying AI is going to wipe us out. I watch their Youtube videos before going to sleep. And honestly, that stuff scares me. Not so much the tech itself, but the idea that a few people or companies could end up with way too much power.

But at the same time I really enjoy what AI lets me do right now. About a year ago I switched from Windows to Linux, and I probably wouldn’t have survived that transition without GPT helping me troubleshoot things. Yesterday I had an interesting experience. My PC finally installed a huge backlog of updates (like 51 of them), and after rebooting Ubuntu, Steam just refused to launch.

I tried the usual troubleshooting. GPT gave me some simple checks at first, but it quickly turned into this deep dive with multiple terminal windows open, watching output, trying to figure out what was crashing. After about an hour of failing at this, I got the idea to just ask GPT to handle the whole thing itself. I told it to come up with a plan, figure out the steps, and write a script I could run. Then I pasted script in a file and run it. It gathered a bunch of log files that I then uploaded, in next step it found the issue, wrote another script to fix it, and Steam is running again like nothing happened. Everything now works.

So I’m stuck between these two feelings:
AI is incredibly useful and fun, and I love experimenting with new tools, using it for DIY stuff, home improvement, tech problems. I feel lucky to be alive at this time to experience all of this.
But I’m also worried that human nature and greed, power, short term politics could turn this into something dangerous, like techno‑feudalism. Generative AI doesn't seem to be helpful to democracy because few companies concentrate a lot of influence and can lobby politicians in their favor. Automating jobs they will also generate a lot of profit while also reducing bargaining power from large part of population. Unemployed persons can scream but have no real influence. AI can also be very effectively used for surveilance and population control. That makes me ask how will democracy survive this?

I don’t really know what to make of all this. Curious how other people see it.