Silicon Valley executives promise that artificial intelligence is going to radically change everyone’s life for the better, starting just a few minutes from now. A.I. is described as the new electricity. It’s even bigger than fire. Don’t bother saving money for retirement because everyone will be rich rich rich.
Your grandparents heard pretty much the same thing. The creators of a new technology have always sold it as producing a fundamental transformation of human existence. The radio was touted as bringing “perpetual peace on earth.” Television was supposed to arouse so much empathy for different cultures that it would end war. Cable television would educate the masses and lead to widespread enlightenment.
This time, though, the masses have not been won over.
In a You.gov survey last year, more than a third of respondents said they were concerned that A.I. would end human life on earth. Even those with a more hopeful attitude overwhelmingly said in another poll that they would not pay extra to put A.I. on their devices. And in the most recent large survey conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 80 percent of firms reported that A.I. was having no impact on their productivity or employment.
The chief salesman of the A.I. boom, Sam Altman of OpenAI, said there was more resistance to “the diffusion, the absorption” of A.I. into the culture and economy than he expected.
“Looking at what’s possible, it does feel sort of surprisingly slow,” Mr. Altman said at an A.I. conference this month.
Jensen Huang, chief executive of the chip maker Nvidia, is worried. The tech industry hype may seem omnipresent, but Mr. Huang feels “the battle of narratives” is being won by the critics.
“It’s extremely hurtful, frankly,” Mr. Huang said in a podcast interview last month. “A lot of damage” has been done by “very well-respected people who have painted a doomer narrative, end-of-the-world narrative, science fiction narrative.”
In Mr. Huang’s view, the critics want regulations that will hamper the A.I. industry and slow it down. Meanwhile, the skeptics are “scaring people from making the investments in A.I.” that would make it better.
Nvidia, which makes the chips that power A.I. data centers, does not lack investors. It is now the most highly valued company in the world, with a market capitalization of $4.5 trillion. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have also seen their values soar. Some A.I. start-ups have become fantastically valuable practically overnight in a way never quite seen before, starting with OpenAI.
Mr. Huang is nevertheless correct. Adoption has plateaued. In the fourth quarter of 2025, 38 percent of employees told Gallup that their workplace had integrated A.I. technology. That number was essentially unchanged from the third quarter.
A.I. is clearly not technology that is being universally encouraged as inevitable. Corporations often report that, so far, it does not seem to do much. But fears are everywhere. The S&P North American software index fell 15 percent in January, its biggest monthly decline in 17 years, on fears that A.I. would replace software.
“I can’t really remember a boom with such active hostility to it,” said William Quinn, co-author of “Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles.” “People usually find new technology exciting. It happened with electricity, bicycles, motorcars. There were fears but also hopes. A.I. is notable, perhaps unique, for the lack of enthusiasm.”
Even as more than half of Americans have tried large language models (and virtually everyone who has done anything online has inadvertently used A.I.), studies show that people are far more worried than they are excited. According to Pew, 61 percent of respondents to a 2025 survey said they wished they had more control over how A.I. was used in their own life.
(The New York Times has sued OpenAI and Microsoft, claiming copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied the suit’s claims.)
The indifference and hostility to A.I. were probably inevitable. A.I.’s champions describe an unsettling future where humans who use the technology will replace those who don’t.
Perhaps this is why A.I. regulation is one of the few issues that a divided America seems united on. Eighty percent of Americans want rules for A.I. even if that means the technology develops more slowly, according to a Gallup survey last spring.
It’s not just low-skill workers who are wary. Each year Edelman, the global communications firm, surveys trust in society. In its latest report, released in January, two-thirds of low-income U.S. respondents said that “people like me will be left behind rather than realize any real advantages from generative A.I.” Perhaps more remarkably, nearly half the high-income workers felt the same way.
A Boom in Booms
Era-defining booms used to be few and far between. The South Seas mania of 1720. The British railway boom in the 1840s. The Roaring Twenties. Tokyo in the 1980s.
These booms followed a familiar pattern. A few investors assert that new developments, usually involving technology, changed things. Early believers make money. That draws in more investors. Critics are drowned out. Speculators take over. The boom becomes a bubble and pops. Everyone has regrets and swears to be more sober in the future.
Eventually a new technology comes along. Utopia beckons, and the process begins again.
“One generation after another has renewed the belief that, whatever was said about earlier technologies, the latest one will fulfill a radical and revolutionary promise,” Vincent Mosco, a technology historian, wrote in “The Digital Sublime: Myth, Power, and Cyberspace.”
Bubbles are coming thick and fast these days. There is a boom in booms.
“There was the Japanese stock bubble, then the Thai and Taiwanese bubbles, then dot-com, housing, the Chinese stock market, crypto and now A.I.,” said Mr. Quinn, a senior lecturer in finance at Queen’s University Belfast. “You have very mobile financing, a deregulated financial system and rapid technological change, all of which make it easy for ordinary people to speculate.”
A few months ago, worried about a stock market that seemed to have little basis for its continued ascent, analysts and investors began wondering how the A.I. boom would end. The boom of the Roaring Twenties ended in the Great Depression, after all.
The debate produced little consensus. Andrew Odlyzko, a scholar of investment manias, thinks the discussion stalled because it relied too much on an outdated notion of booms and bubbles.
Look at cryptocurrency, he suggested. It has been around for 15 years. Few pretend anymore that crypto has any value beyond speculation. But while its price has weakened lately, it has risen over the longer term.
The high price is a reflection of just one thing: the faith of its investors, which — at least so far — has overwhelmed doubts.
“As our society is getting more complicated and wealthier, it is losing contact with reality,” said Dr. Odlyzko, a former head of the University of Minnesota’s Digital Technology Center. “Mass psychology is now far more important than technology or economics.”
A.I. doesn’t have to change humanity. The tech companies just need to make you think it is succeeding.
Doom and Doomer
For all the familiarity of its promises to change the world, some things about the A.I. boom truly are different — and are holding it back from the warm embrace of the public.
Past booms like the California gold rush in 1849 or the dot-com excitement offered at least the illusion of public participation. You, too, could go to California and try your luck.
Starting an A.I. company, on the other hand, requires expertise and serious funding. For most people, A.I. is instead something imposed on them, starting with their email and Web browser.
Another problem is that the biggest boosters of A.I. have a tendency to come out with very dark comments, sometimes without seeming to realize it. The talk-show host Jimmy Fallon last winter somewhat plaintively asked Bill Gates, the Microsoft co-founder, “Will we still need humans?”
Mr. Gates replied: “Not for most things.”
Just last week, Mrinank Sharma, the leader of the safeguards research team at Anthropic, cryptically posted on social media that he felt pressured “to set aside what matters most.” The world, he said, “is in peril” and that while the problems were “not just from AI,” he was quitting to write poetry.
The “doomer narratives,” as Mr. Huang of Nvidia would call them, are coming from inside the A.I. house.
The tech executives who are betting their companies’ futures on the triumph of A.I. have many resources to make sure it happens. They can spend even more money to build even more data centers. On the other hand, data centers around the country are increasingly a target of opposition for local residents who dislike the noise, the disruption, the secrecy and the lack of community benefits like jobs.
Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, recognizes the risks here. He believes that “the real question” is when A.I. will be perceived as helping people.
People admire A.I. as a newfangled tech tool that can perhaps do amazing things, he suggested at the Davos economics forum last month. But they don’t necessarily see a positive effect in their own lives.
“I think we, even as a global community, have to get to a point where we’re using this to do something useful that changes the outcomes of people and communities and countries,” Mr. Nadella said.
Without that, he warned, the technology will lose “social permission” to, for example, use as much energy as it does — a thirst pushing up the price of electricity for U.S. households.
The A.I. companies seem increasingly alert to a perception problem. This year’s Super Bowl featured A.I.-themed ads that were defensive or just odd. Amazon’s ad showed A.I. proposing ways to kill Chris Hemsworth. The twist at the end: A.I. disarms him with a promised massage.
In Thrall to Devices
Anxiety over technology has been building for a long time. What is new with A.I. is that the fears are so vague yet so comprehensive that they are breaching the walls of Silicon Valley itself.
In a 2024 survey of registered voters in the Bay Area, three-quarters said the leading tech companies had too much power and influence.
Robert Thomas, a retired Bay Area psychologist, is one of the disaffected. “At first we greatly anticipated the electronic conveniences created by cybergeniuses — the personal computer, the internet, the iPad, the iPod, etc.,” he said. “However, since then things feel out of control. More and more, my life is partly controlled by some electronic device.”
Even worse, “I barely relate to people anymore.”
From the point of view of the A.I. promoters, an inability to relate to human beings is not a defect but a virtue. “I suspect that in a couple of years on almost any topic, the most interesting, maybe the most empathetic conversation that you could have will be with an A.I.,” Mr. Altman, the OpenAI chief executive, said on a podcast.
No wonder Mr. Thomas, who is 78, often feels frustrated. He fantasizes about punching a young tech worker in face. And yet. He had ChatGPT write a speech for his wife’s birthday. It was beautiful and eloquent.
All of which means the future of A.I. could probably go either way.
