It's projection and displacement. The people most active in worrying about AI threats can easily see what industrial capitalism is doing to the biosphere: stripping everything that makes it a viable support system for life in order to build something that's only a viable support system for markets. But they are also ideologically committed to industrial capitalism, so they can't bring themselves to admit it. Instead, they externalize those criticisms and fears onto an abstract future threat, so they don't have to deal with the current one. That's why you'll see AI bros saying that AGI is an existential threat, while global warming doesn't matter in the long run.