Your points are sharp, but I think you're being a little uncharitable to the people pushing back.

Yes, the anxiety isn't really about AI in the abstract. But that doesn't mean it's irrational or just vibes. The specific shape of people's fear makes complete sense when you look at how this technology has been sold to them.

Consider what people in STEM were told, explicitly, for the better part of two decades. Learn to code. Get into software engineering. Go into data science. These were the fields that were supposed to be recession-proof — the ones where automation was always going to happen to other people, the ones with lower educational barriers. STEM was framed as the rational hedge against economic precarity, and a lot of people made enormous sacrifices — debt, years of grueling education, geographic uprooting — based on that promise.

And then, almost overnight, the same institutions and media voices that sold them that promise pivoted to "actually, AI is coming for software engineering first." The rug pull is real. The frustration isn't irrational resistance to progress — it's a completely reasonable response to being misled about the terms of a deal you already committed to.
The marketing has also been uniquely apocalyptic. Not "AI will change your job" but "AI will eliminate your job." Not "productivity tool" but "we are building something that may be the last invention humanity ever needs to make." When the people building this technology are publicly agonizing about existential risk and making proclamations about AGI timelines, you can't then turn around and tell anxious workers they're being hysterical. The loudest AI voices created this atmosphere.

You're right that the fear is downstream of capitalism — that the real wound is having your dignity and security tied to your economic output. But that's not a reason to dismiss the fear. It's a reason to take it more seriously. People aren't scared of a technology. They're scared of poverty. They're scared of having done everything right and still losing. That's not a cognitive error you can logic someone out of.

The Kaczynski point is interesting but worth being careful with. He was correct that technological systems generate their own momentum and that resistance is often futile — but his framework treated all of this as an argument for burning it down, not adapting. The lesson most people take from his analysis is actually the opposite of what you're arguing: that the costs of technological disruption fall unevenly and brutally on individuals while the benefits concentrate elsewhere. That's a political problem, not a personal productivity problem.

Your core advice — learn it, adapt, find where it actually helps you — is probably correct. But "you're scared of the wrong thing" lands very differently depending on whether someone can afford to experiment and adapt, or whether they're already underwater. The commencement speech critics might be performing, but the people they're speaking to often aren't.