When you talk about "participatory democracy" in a thread like this, you are enabling them in their delusion that people do care. The AI safetyist think tanks put out these pushpolls trying to convince themselves that voters care about AI doom. They seal up the walls of their echo chamber, and they believe themselves to be heroes. Then one day, one of them throws a Molotov, and nobody is surprised.
Which is precisely why they've resorted to violence.
We can do better than denigrating positions as "hobbyhorse." HN deserves better than that.
We can attempt to deduce the root cause, but please don't assume we're on different epistemic footing. It's speculation and that's fine.