> 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...