tl;dr - "we must remember that there is great popular and political demand for techno-apocalypse stories."

This article does a very nice job of reviewing the rise of the popular belief that technology will kill us all.

It begins by pointing out that this was not always the case:

Ben Franklin watched the prototype hot air balloons and immediately realized that air power would someday transform war, but rather than feeling anxious about the destruction it would cause, he hoped it might “[c]onvinc[e] sovereigns of the folly of wars.” This futurism was unusual even among intellectuals like Franklin.

But alas sometime after the 1860s it began to be popular to claim that this or that technology would lead to human extermination.

Apparently, there was a time when people were very concerned that airplanes were going to be the end for us:

*[T]here is, as has been most truly said, no way of complete disarmament except the abolition of flying. Now that, again, is impossible. We have never known mankind go back on a new invention. It might be a good thing for this world, as I have heard some of the most distinguished men in the Air Service say, if man had never learned to fly. But he has learned to fly, and there is no more important question, not only before this House, but before every man, woman and child in Europe, than: “What are we going to do with this power now we have got it?"

The author seems to identify WWI as the real turning point when the popular discourse began to feel that apocalypse was a likely outcome of technological progress.

But for people who had imagined their technological superiority also made them morally superior to past civilizations, and who had long forgotten the last time their great powers fought a total war targeting civilians en masse, World War II felt like a near-apocalypse which came within a hair’s breadth of destroying civilization entirely. The illusion of rational progress “advanc[ing] steadily toward some kind of Utopia” was wounded by the First World War, and killed by the Second.

But now it seems we are on a snappy conveyor belt of technology driven apocalypses:

Much as the fears of nuclear apocalypse switched from radiation to nuclear winter when a new justification was needed, the ecological fears switched from pollution to global warming. In the late 1980s, ecological projections that carbon emissions would raise global temperatures by several degrees celsius and cause substantial disruptions to local climates and human life broke into mainstream awareness

As stated at the top: such apocalypses are useful to people who want to build movements or make money -- we are all going to die, unless you buy my product turns out to be pretty good marketing. Sadly, the people who capitalize on apocalypses that never arrive don't seem to bear much downside:

There is no big finale to the debate, there is no explicit acknowledgement that the apocalypse is cancelled. People simply wander away from the subject. This seems to be less because the core arguments get refuted with reason and evidence, and more because people slowly lose faith after enough of the activists’ predictions about worldwide famines in the 1970s, or cities flooded by 2015, do not come to pass.

Interesting read.