Nobody Actually Wants AI and Silicon Valley Is Starting to Panic About It

Silicon Valley has spent hundreds of billions of dollars telling everyone that AI is bigger than fire, more important than electricity, and basically the second coming of everything. There's just one tiny problem: normal people don't care.

A new report from The New York Times lays it all out. Despite all the hype, all the Super Bowl ads, and all the promises that AI will make everyone rich, the general public is somewhere between unimpressed and actively worried. In one survey, more than a third of people said they're concerned AI could literally end human life on Earth. And the people who ARE optimistic? They overwhelmingly said they wouldn't pay extra for AI features.

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, recently admitted that AI adoption is spreading more slowly than he expected. Let that sink in. The guy running the most hyped AI company on the planet is saying people aren't using it as fast as he thought they would.

This is a huge deal because the entire AI boom is built on the assumption that everyone will eventually use this stuff. If they don't, those trillion-dollar valuations start looking a lot like the dot-com bubble. And we all remember how that ended.

The comparison to previous tech hypes is brutal. Radio was supposed to bring world peace. TV was going to end war through empathy. Cable was going to educate everyone. None of that happened, and tech leaders are starting to worry this time might be different too, just not in the way they hoped.

As reported by The New York Times.

Source: The New York Times