And yet this is how people seem to view it (even looking at the "serious" conversations on singularityhub and similar places). Their view of has this real idiot/god dichotomy going on, dramatized so that it only takes seconds from "it's just a dumb computer" to "it's become self-aware" to "it's taken over the entire internet and built an army of robots!"

Thinking about it, it probably comes from our general perceptions (based on conventional software development) that computers will either not do something at all, or they'll do it blindingly fast. And even people who work with computers often don't really grok the difference between multiplying two big matrices, and pondering the best way to approach an unsolved problem.