If you look at the backgrounds of the list of people who have signed the "AI Doomer" manifesto (the one urging what I'd call an overly extreme level of caution), such at Geoffrey Hinton, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Elon Musk etc... you will find that they're all rational materialists.

I don't think the correlation is accidental.

So you're on to something, here. And I've felt the exact same way as you, here. I'd love to see your blog post when it's done.