In a recent podcast chat with New York Times columnist Ezra Klein, Ben Buchanan, former special adviser for AI in the Biden White House said humanity is going to soon “see extraordinarily capable AI systems. I don’t love the term artificial general intelligence, but I think that will fit in the next couple of years, quite likely during Donald Trump’s presidency.” It’s a forecast that syncs with the views of many Silicon Valley technologists and AI company executives. Prediction markets, too.
All of which has led me to wonder if 2025 will be our last normal year. As such, it’s a good time to take stock of where our collective head is at concerning technological change. Helping to do that is Deepwater Asset Management’s 2025 Frontier Tech Survey, which polled 1,000 US consumers in January on their views about emerging technology. Three broad groups of findings stand out:
Rapid AI diffusion continues. Some 25 percent of Americans now commune daily with AI, up from 15 percent last year—a hefty increase, but we’re not yet at anything like ubiquitous adoption. ChatGPT and Gemini have established a duopoly of sorts in the AI marketplace, while smaller players are suffering a steady erosion of market position. This is unexpected: Workers appear increasingly sanguine about their algorithmic colleagues. The share expressing grave concern about AI-induced redundancy dipped four percentage points. (I wonder if the stratospheric hype doesn’t match their everyday experience using these models.) A notable gender gap persists, with men 50 percent more likely than women to embrace these digital oracles. The industry faces a thorny commercial challenge, however, as 62 percent of potential users refuse to part with a single dollar for AI services.
Electric dreams on the fritz. The proportion of Americans intending to purchase battery-powered transport has reversed by five percentage points, while gasoline engines have expanded their lead by six points. Tesla, the standard-bearer of electrification, has seen its brand preference decline by eight points to 39 percent—still strong but less commanding than before. A telling economic divide has emerged: The well-heeled are more than twice as likely to contemplate an electric purchase as their less affluent counterparts. Regional disparities tell their own tale, with Midwesterners growing notably cool toward the technology, doubtless influenced by frigid winters that drain battery performance. As for self-driving vehicles, Americans remain generationally split: Those under 44 show way more faith in silicon chauffeurs than their elders.
Our technological frenemy. Roughly half of Americans report a willingness to contemplate brain-computer interfaces. This openness increases marginally with education levels and decreases markedly with age, suggesting a future divided along generational lines. This is troubling: A rising tide of technological dependency with 36 percent of respondents now acknowledging some form of addiction, up from 30 percent a year ago. What’s more, 12 percent of young adults report “heavy addiction” compared with just two percent of those over 54.
My big takeaway: Amid the customary hand-wringing about technological dystopia that has pervaded our society for a half century, a more nuanced reality seems to be emerging. Americans aren’t so much rejecting as recalibrating their relationship with AI. Job anxieties are subsiding even as daily AI interactions are increasing. So, for now, neither a wholesale embrace nor a fearful recoil that pessimists predicted—but rather something refreshingly human: a measured adaptation that bodes well for our ability and willingness to harness these increasingly clever machines to amplify our human potential.
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