Maintream sci-fi has greatly misinformed the average person about AI.

I feel like the average person won't appreciate actual AGI or ASI as a monumental achievement. They will of course benefit from and suffer the consequences and react to those as they happen. But they won't really grasp how difficult it was to achieve and what a big deal it is for science, tech, and the future. They see it in sci-fi all the time - like Star Trek, Star Wars, Interstellar, the MCU, but none of them go above "enhanced Siri" level. In other words, in most cases it really is just a slightly enhanced Siri - a universal GUI or keyboard replacement. But humans still do all the thinking and actual work that matters. Computers/robots just take commands and provide info or perform basic actions.

The AI in star trek lets you give the ship commands. They did have Data, who was marginally above human level in perpetuity, however. The AI in Iron Man lets you build and test 3d models and simulations with your voice and hand gestures. AI in Interstellar is a GUI for a robot that performs basic actions. AI in Halo is Siri with a hologram. AI in Star Wars is just slapstick comedy robots with some basic utility.

And maybe the first iteration of AI (next step after current chat bots) really is a universal GUI - every computer, every computer program, every robot can be controlled naturally with your voice and other tools only when more precision is needed (like if you want to sketch and have AI complete the painting or wave your hands around like Tony Stark). That's fantastic and world changing in many ways.

But then comes AGI - an AI with agency, its own ideas, ability to learn as it goes, reflect, think, test things, prototype, and self-improve. And ultimately leave us in the dust. That kind of AI is largely ignored by mainstream sci-fi because it doesn't allow humans to be the main character or to even have much of an influence on events or any hope of fighting back if it came to a conflict. There's little in the way of human drama or significance. Even Skynet or the tripods in War of the Worlds are horribly inefficient and dumbed down to give humans a fighting chance. For the same reason, sci-fi doesn't represent alien invasions correctly either - because once again, humans would have no chance or significance, and certainly wouldn't be the main character. Maybe Hitchhikers' Guide to the Galaxy came close - the planet was "demolished" in the first 5 minutes of the story very casually and uneventfully. But even that story couldn't do AI justice - it was just a glorified Siri in a depressed robot body serving as comic relief.

So yeah sorry for the long post - the average person has never encountered media that properly reflects on the implications of AGI, and they've been consistently misinformed by sci-fi that AI is just a glorified GUI at best, even hundreds or thousands of years in the future. And I'd love a universal GUI for everything, but it's just a step right before AGI rather than the pinnacle of AI as mainstream sci-fi would have you believe. And that's a big part of why the average person is completely unprepared for what's coming.