> The elephant in the room here is that, like so many issues, AI has become political for some people. In this case your "AI skeptic friends" are your "defund the police" and "abolish ICE" friends. For 95% of people AI is just a new technology to be loved and feared.

I really don’t think there is this “elephant” at all. If you reduce critique, skepticism and fear people might have to political slogans of mainly fringe online activists, I wonder how objective your assessment of those attitudes can actually be.

I recommend you take a look at this research published by Pew. You can see that concern about AI is much higher than 5% and is shared across the political spectrum: https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-p...

Fear of AI is universal but skepticism is not. It's a (primarily) far left meme that AI is just hype and should be compared to scams like cryptocurrencies.

I linked you research showing the opposite of what you claim. I'd recommend not looking at topics through this culture war lens, it tends to corrupts people's ability to be objective and thoughtful.

I'd recommend understanding the point before missing it so entirely and repeatedly.

You claimed that "concern about AI is much higher than 5%" which has nothing to do with the point about AI skepticism I'm talking about.

In fact, having concerns about AI implies a lack of skepticism about its power (although people are often hold incoherent views).

Maybe you could consider that some of us are not AI skeptics "in advance" and have already witnessed its downsides that in some particular conditions outweight its upsides.

AI, like every technology, has downsides. The AI skeptics are pretending AI has little to no upsides.