You're spot on with everything you're saying. 

I remember working at Best Buy for a holiday season ages ago, but I recall a lot (the majority by far) of people preferring a TV's "vivid" mode settings over proper color calibration. People just want a flashy, bright image. So much so that I remember one family coming back in to the store and berating a co-worker because they made the "TV look worse", when he just calibrated it properly, we had to just flip the settings back to vivid mode and they were happy with that, lol. 

There is a field of history that explores how it has been done in the past. Your question is answered by exploring that history. There is no simple answer that can fit in a video game forum post, nor is there a shortcut for what needs to be done.

The sooner a critical mass of working people realize that, the more time and leverage we'll have.

You mean a mass strike? That might result in their employers replacing them with AI anyway. -_-

That's why it is important that it happens sooner rather than later. AI can't replace entire workforces yet, and we are still quite a bit away from that. But honestly if 20% of the population is unemployed then it will be a lot more than a mass strike. 

Why isn't the strike happening already?

Because people are not organized. Instead they're going to the internet and posting complaints there. They need to organize in real life. Nothing is going to change by complaining on the internet. 

Edit: As things get more dire, people will become a bit more serious, I hope. 

But you need to look at a large picture too. Is the human population more advanced and more populous, than before? How do you envision is traveling to other planets without help of advances machinery including some form of AI? The current problem with the whole AI development framework is in my opinion lack of transparency and a huge investments from big tech.

Because of that, lots of people will lose jobs short term, as those companies will lay off substantial amount of workforce to justify spendings in AI development. I strongly believe that we can solve it by having open source movements created by sane and moral group of people that will share publicly every detail about ongoing development and focus on security, ethicality, and applicability first. It's normal that a lot of people are against something like AI when they don't see benefits of it or lose their income because of those LLMs. The net positives are things like automated society that can enjoy even greater security and faster advancements than before AI adoption.

Right now we are far away from real AI systems, as currently what we can use is semi-intelligence made by big techs and for profit organizations.

Before we worry about traveling to other planets we need to sort out more basic things like how to live peacefully and sustainably on this one; AI in its current form is more hindrance than help in this regard with how it's already being used for misinformation and other ethically dubious practises.

Everyone knows the benefits of the internet existing so I won't go into them but without it I never would've met my boyfriend and a lot of my close friends so the perspective that it's been largely detrimental is wild to me. I think anyone who feels that way is taking the benefits of it for granted and is overly focusing on the negatives. And it is a matter of debate yeah, that's why I've been bringing up various use cases as a way to show how the technology is already having significant benefits since the positives often go unnoticed compared to the negatives.

In general a lot of this is that a ton of the benefits are a future thing. Like the technology is already doing massive things like helping out medical research, scientific research in general and letting self driving cars be developed so huge future benefits are already baked in at this point so for me I'm taking that into account in my perspective of it. While just how exactly impactful AI will become is up in the air it's already clear that it's gonna help save a lot of lives and prevent a lot of suffering in the future and that's easily worth all the current negatives. Since a lot of the current positives are more in the background so aren't directly impacting most people yet a way to think of this is it's like going through some discomfort for a period of time to reap a ton of rewards later on.

If AI is already causing numerous problems from mass layoffs to stealing people's works to the enshittification of the internet, how do we know it won't get worse and worse rather than better over time?

Is a world of mass employment and digital/political dystopia really worth self driving cars?