My social groups are almost exclusively non-techie. I am regularly exposed to networks that are very, very far away from HN. I assure you, there are people think AI is useless and purely harmful (in the sense of creating "slop," wasting electricity and water, etc. not evil AI). And there are a lot of them.
To be fair, the general public have been conditioned for a while now by things like blockchain and VR to be completely underwhelmed, perhaps rightfully so, by whatever's coming out of San Fran and Seattle.
So in the public consciousness it's like (NFTs, meme coins, metaverse, AI)
When I think it's more like (internet, smartphones, AI)
We'll see who's right in a few years I guess. But I'll +1 your view that plenty of people put AI in the first group, I know a few myself.
