Is the stance here that AI is more dangerous than those because of its black box nature, it’s poor guardrails, the fact that it’s a developing technology, or it’s unfettered access?

All of the above I guess. Although I am not keen on making a comparison to these previous things. I have previously written about how IoT/“Smart” devices are a massive security issue, for example. This is not a competition, the point is not whether or not these tools are worse by some degree from some other problematic technologies, the point is that the AI hype would have you believe they are some end-all demiurgs when the real threat is coming from inside the house.

Also, do you think that the “popularity” of Google Gemini is because people were already indoctrinated into the Assistant ecosystem before it became Gemini, and Google already had a stranglehold on the search market so the integration of Gemini into those services isn’t seen as dangerous because people are already reliant and Google is a known brand rather than a new “startup”.

I don’t know about Gemini’s actual popularity. What I do know is that it is being shoved down people’s throats in every possible way.

My feeling is that a lot of people would prefer to use their tools and devices the way they had before this crap came down the pipeline but they simply don’t know how to turn it off reliably (partially because Google makes it really hard to do so), and so Google gets to make bullish claims on line-going-up as far as “people using Gemini” are concerned.