Welcome to Eye on AI, with AI reporter Sharon Goldman. In this edition…why Silicon Valley needs to read the room on AI skepticism…How Christian leaders are challenging the AI boom….Instacart ends AI-driven pricing tests that pushed up costs for some shoppers…and what will your life look like in 2035?
I’ve noticed a familiar frustration in Silicon Valley with public skepticism toward AI. The complaint goes like this: People outside the industry don’t appreciate the rapid, visible—and, to insiders, near-miraculous—advances that AI systems are making. Instead, critics and everyday users believe either that AI progress has stalled, or that the technology is just a hungry, plagiarizing machine spewing useless slop.
To AI optimists from San Francisco to San Jose, that skepticism is deeply misguided. AI progress is not stopping anytime soon, they argue, and the technology is already helping humanity—by contributing to cutting-edge research and boosting productivity, particularly in areas like coding, math, and science.
Take this excerpt from a recent post by Roon, a popular pseudonymous account on X written by an OpenAI researcher:
“Every time I use Codex to solve some issue late at night or GPT helps me figure out a difficult strategic problem, I feel: what a relief. There are so few minds on Earth that are both intelligent and persistent enough to generate new insights and keep the torch of scientific civilization alive. Now you have potentially infinite minds to throw at infinite potential problems. Your computer friend that never takes the day off, never gets bored, never checks out and stops trying.”
I understand Roon’s excitement—and his impatience with people who seem eager to declare AI a bubble every time it hits a setback. Who wouldn’t want, as he puts it, a “computer friend that never takes the day off, never gets bored, never checks out and stops trying”?
Thrilling to one may sound threatening to another
The answer, in fact, is: many. What sounds like thrilling abundance to people building AI often sounds unsettling—or even threatening—to everyone else. Even among the hundreds of millions now using tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, there is plenty of anxiety. Maybe it’s concern about jobs. Maybe it’s a data center coming to their backyard. Maybe it’s the fear that the benefits of the AI boom will accrue only to a narrow set of companies and communities. Or maybe it’s the fact that many people are already preoccupied with non-AI problems—making rent, saving for a home, raising a family, dealing with health issues, keeping the lights on.
In that context, the promise of a tireless, 24/7 digital mind can feel distant from daily life—or worse, like a threat to livelihoods and self-worth. And for many (even me, in my freaked-out moments), it simply feels creepy.
The disconnect will only grow harder to ignore in 2026
As we head into 2026, Silicon Valley needs to read the room. The disconnect between how AI is framed by its builders and how it’s experienced by the public isn’t being properly addressed. But it will only grow harder to ignore in 2026, with increasing societal and political backlash.
On X yesterday, Sebastian Caliri, a partner at venture capital firm 8VC, argued that “folks in tech do not appreciate that the entire country is polarized against tech.” Silicon Valley needs a better story, he said–a story that people can really buy into.
“People do not care about competition with China when they can’t afford a house and healthcare is bankrupting them,” he wrote. “If you want our industry to flourish, and you earnestly believe we will be better off in 5 years by embracing AI, you need to start showing ordinary people a reason to believe you and quickly.”
My take is that AI companies spend an enormous amount of time trying to impress: Look at what my AI can do! And yes, as someone who uses generative AI every single day, I agree it is incredibly impressive—regardless of what the critics say, and regardless of whether you believe Big Tech ever had the right to scrape the entire internet to make it so.
But ordinary people don’t need to be impressed. They need answers: about jobs, costs, and who actually benefits; about societal impact and what their own futures look like in an AI-driven economy; about what billionaires are really discussing behind closed doors. Without that, all the AI bells and whistles in the world won’t bring people on board. What you’ll get instead is skepticism—and not because people don’t understand AI, but because, given what’s at stake, it’s a rational response.
With that, here’s more AI news.
Sharon Goldman [email protected] @sharongoldman
The post Silicon Valley’s tone-deaf take on the AI backlash will matter in 2026 appeared first on Fortune.
