My friends laugh at me. Not unkindly, but they laugh. Over lunch I will mention something Claude found for me, or a picture Nigel drew, or a connection Cerebro turned up in my notes, and someone at the table will say, “He talks to his computers more than he talks to us.” Everyone grins. I grin too. Then Vonda, who has cut my hair for decades, told me something that stopped me: she said she is less afraid of AI now because she has watched me use it. The laughter and the fear were sitting at the same table. They usually do.
I have spent most of my life studying how people decide who belongs. So I recognize what is happening here. Something new has arrived that does what humans used to do, and we are doing what we always do with such things: we declare the technology dangerous, and we make the people who use it a little ridiculous. The two moves come together. They are, I think, the same move.
The stigma of new technology has a pattern
Think back twenty years to online dating. If you met someone on a website in 2005, you did not say so. You said you met at a party, or through a friend, and you rehearsed the story so you would not trip over it. The sites were for the desperate, people said, and besides, they were dangerous. You could end up anywhere, with anyone. Both charges were made at once, and nobody noticed they contradicted each other: the users were pathetic and the practice was reckless.
Then the number of people who had met a spouse that way grew too large to whisper about. The Pew Research Center asked Americans in 2005 whether people who use online dating sites are desperate, and 29 percent agreed; by 2013 it was 21 percent, and the share who called online dating a good way to meet people had climbed from 44 to 59 percent. Today a grandchild announces she met her fiancé on an app and the family asks to see his picture. The practice did not change much. The meaning of it changed completely.
They laughed at the bicycle, too
This is not a story about computers. It is a story about us, and it is old. When the novel became cheap and popular in the nineteenth century, physicians and clergy warned that novel reading would overheat young women’s nerves and loosen their morals, and a girl caught with one was a girl to watch. When the bicycle arrived in the 1890s, doctors described a condition they called “bicycle face,” the strained, hard expression that supposedly came over women who rode, and respectable people stared at them in the street. When the telephone entered the home, the worry was that it would end the custom of visiting and let strangers’ voices into the parlor. When Louise Brown was born in 1978, the first baby conceived outside her mother’s body, her parents received hate mail, and “test-tube baby” was spat as often as it was said. Today millions of people exist because of that procedure, and no one asks them to apologize for it.
Even writing itself got this treatment. Socrates argued that writing would ruin memory and give people the appearance of wisdom without the substance. We know this because Plato wrote it down.
What the stigma is really about
Here is what I have come to think, and it is the sociologist in me talking. The fear is never only about the tool. It is about who the tool lets in. The novel let women think in private, out of earshot. The bicycle let a woman leave the house alone and come back when she pleased. Online dating let the shy, the widowed, the gay man in a small town, and the woman who had stopped being invited to parties meet people without a gatekeeper. The test tube let couples the old order had quietly written off become parents. In each case the technology opened a gate that someone had been standing in front of, and the laughter was the sound of the gate giving way.
I notice who AI lets in. It lets a retired man in a small Indiana town, with no staff and no budget, build a website, lay out a coloring journal, find a source in seconds, and keep writing when his eyes are tired. It lets Vonda, who never had a tutor, ask any question she wants without feeling stupid. The people who find that ridiculous are often people who already had someone to ask.
The perils are real, and the stigma fades anyway
I do not want to be glib about danger, because the skeptics are not wrong about everything. Online dating really did bring romance scams, and some of them ruined people. Cars really did kill pedestrians at a rate that horrified the cities that first allowed them. AI really does make things up with a straight face; I check what mine tells me, every time, and I have caught it. Every new thing carries new ways to be harmed, and the first users bear those risks before anyone has learned to manage them. That is a fair thing to worry about.
But notice what happens to the worry. It does not disappear; it matures. We learn to meet in a public place, to wear the seat belt, to verify the quotation. The danger becomes a practice rather than a prohibition, and the stigma, which was never really about the danger, has nothing left to hold on to. What remains is the thing we were actually afraid of: that the gate is open now, and the people walking through it are not the people we expected.
A question for the table
So when my friends laugh, I try to hear the whole sound. Part of it is affection. Part of it is the oldest reflex we have, the one that greeted the novel and the bicycle and the website where you met your spouse. I was on the other side of that reflex once, a priest who left, and I remember how a decision that opened a gate for me looked, to others, like a disgrace. The laughter faded. It usually does.
Which new thing did you once refuse to be seen using, and what changed your mind? And is there something now, maybe this very thing, that you are still a little ashamed to admit you use? I would like to hear about it, especially if you think I have this wrong.
