Public Polling on AI Is Consistently Negative. Let Me Explain Why.
Mobile brought everyone to the table. AI is pulling up the chairs. The people most affected by AI job displacement are the same people who lack the sophistication to participate in the AI economy.
Public polling on AI is consistently negative. Let me explain why.
Personal computing was a technology for the educated and the affluent. Same with the early internet. Both waves created enormous value. Both largely skipped two thirds of America.
Mobile changed that. For the first time in the history of computing, a technology arrived that worked for everyone regardless of education or income. No manual. No learning curve. Intuitive by design. A grandmother in rural Mississippi and a software engineer in San Francisco were equally capable of using it.
Mobile phones were the great technological equalizer.
That democratizing moment was real. And it mattered.
AI is reversing it.
The current form of AI requires a level of language sophistication that most Americans don't have and most AI companies aren't designing for. The average Google query is three words. The average LLM query is thirty two words. Prompt engineering is a skill. It requires education, comfort with abstraction, and time to develop. The people who have those things are already advantaged.
We run a post purchase survey at Rainbow. For the past six months roughly 25% of our customers use AI tools. That number hasn't moved.
Rainbow sells clothing, shoes and accessories to Americans of more modest means. Only about a third of this country has a college degree. Two thirds do not. Our customer is most of America. And most of America is not in the AI conversation.
Now consider what the leaders of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Microsoft are saying publicly. Massive job reductions driven by AI. Entire categories of work eliminated. The people most likely to be affected by those reductions are the same people who lack the access and sophistication to participate in the AI economy. They are not in the rooms where this narrative is being shaped. They have no platform to push back.
Public polling on AI is consistently negative. I think this is why. The people being asked have not experienced the benefits. They have experienced only the threat.
Mobile brought everyone to the table.
AI is pulling up the chairs.