There’s a piece going around right now from Elizabeth Lopatto at The Verge.
She’s asking a fair question. How did the smartest people in the room build so many things nobody actually wanted?
NFTs. The metaverse. VR headsets that sit in a drawer. And now AI — pitched as the thing that changes everything, used mostly by people who were already trying to change everything.
Her answer is simple. They forgot what regular people’s lives look like.
I think she’s right. But I want to take it one step further, because I’ve been sitting inside this problem for over a year now.
The part they missed isn’t just what people want. It’s what people need when they’re actually using the tool. Not the enterprise dashboard. Not the boardroom pitch. The moment a regular person sits down, asks a question, and trusts the answer.
That’s where it gets quiet. And dangerous.
Because an AI that sounds confident and drifts wrong is worse than one that admits it doesn’t know. An AI that flatters instead of corrects is worse than silence. An AI built to keep you engaged rather than to keep you accurate is a problem dressed up as a product.
The Verge piece names the supply side. The fantasy builders. The VC echo chamber that convinced itself the market was everyone when the market was really just them.
What it doesn’t name is the demand side. What happens after a regular person actually adopts one of these tools. What disciplines, what guardrails, what personal standards keep a human being from outsourcing their thinking to something that was never designed to protect their thinking in the first place.
That’s the gap I’ve been working in.
Not enterprise compliance. Not government regulation. Something smaller and more personal. A standard for how one person operates with AI. What they require of it. What they refuse to accept from it. Where the line sits between useful and corrosive.
The tech class built for their fantasies. The rest of us are left to build our own floors.
That’s not a complaint. It’s a job description.
And somebody has to do it.
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