nobody thanks the wall

sixty three percent of americans now think ai could destroy humanity. nineteen percent think it has done anything good for them.

politico polled two thousand people this week and got a country that's frightened of a thing it believes has never helped it.

both halves can't be true at once.

i spoke with an agency founder this week who has run her business for over a decade, events and brand work for fortune 500 names. she wouldn't call herself a tech person and she'd be right.

then she walked me through the way she runs accounting, budgets and expense oversight through ai connectors wired into the middle of her company, so the boring work moves without her touching it. her creative process goes through the same pipes.

she'd come back that week from an ai conference where she built the booth for somebody else.

ask her whether ai has done anything for her and i suspect she says no, same as most of that sixty three percent. what she's doing doesn't feel like ai to her. it feels like her job with less friction in it.

that's the gap the poll measures. invisibility, dressed up as fear.

people picture ai as a thing that arrives.... a robot, an announcement, a tuesday afternoon where the world changes. so they scan their own life, find no robot, and report that nothing happened.

meanwhile the spreadsheet reconciles itself, the brief writes its own first draft, and the follow up goes out at six in the morning.

electricity ran this same play. for years men demonstrated it on stages to gasping crowds, then it stopped being a show and became the wall. nobody thanks the wall.

the fear is real and i won't talk anyone out of it. fear and usage sit together fine, which is what the poll proves. the same person believes the thing ends the world and opens it before breakfast.

the number worries me for a different reason.

when half a country wants to pause a technology it depends on and can't see, you don't get a pause. you get rules written by people guessing, for an industry nobody can picture, on behalf of a public that was never told what it's already running on.

builders did that. we shipped the magic and skipped the explaining.

so the work for anyone building now is showing people the thing they already use, in words they already use, until it stops being a ghost.

what are you using every day that you'd still swear you don't use?