Twelve Thousand Feelings

8 minute read

Twelve thousand people. More than a thousand speakers. Almost five hundred companies, spread across a million square feet of a Las Vegas convention floor. A hundred countries, all under one roof to talk about the same thing.

That was Ai4 in early August. And here's the number I can't stop thinking about. A year ago, the same conference drew eight thousand people. This year, twelve thousand. Four thousand more, in a single year. The surge everyone keeps talking about isn't an abstraction anymore. I walked through it. It has a square footage now.

We were all there for the same reason, supposedly. To understand this thing that's reshaping our work and our lives.

I expected to walk away more certain. I walked away struck by something else entirely.

Nobody agreed. About anything.

The Room

Let me tell you what it's actually like in a place like that.

I watched developers argue that AI can't really code, standing a hundred feet from booths where the entire product was clearly built by AI. I sat in a session on vibe coding — building software by just describing what you want in plain language — and listened to the instructor advise the room not to vibe code. In a vibe coding session.

I heard people terrified that AI is coming for every job. I heard people, that same hour, insist it's about to create more jobs than it takes. I walked a show floor with hundreds of companies, and I lost count of how many homepages were obviously Claude-built, the same clean dashboard, the same fingerprints, everywhere, on products from industries that have nothing to do with each other.

And the opinions on where this all goes? They ran the gamut. AI is going to kill us all. AI is going to save the world. And every possible shade in between, all of it spoken with total confidence.

Twelve thousand people. The same technology in front of every one of them. And everyone seeing something different.

A Word for the Feeling

Partway through, a speaker gave me language for what I was looking at.

His name is Ilai Soloducho, and he's the Chief AI Officer at the Strauss Group. He reached for the movie Inside Out — the one where a person's emotions are little characters at a control panel, taking turns running the show. Joy grabs the wheel. Then Fear. Then Anger. You know the movie.

And then he added an emotion the movie didn't have. Trust.

I thought that was such a generous, human way to look at all of this. Because he was describing what happens inside one person when AI shows up. Which emotion grabs the console. Whether Trust ever gets a turn.

But I wasn't watching one person's control panel. I was at a conference with twelve thousand of them, and I watched his idea get bigger than he meant it. It wasn't playing out inside one head. It was spread across a convention center. Every single person walking that floor had a different emotion at the wheel. Fear was driving one badge. Joy was driving the next. Anger, a few rows back. And Trust, the one that would let any of them actually move, was the emotion I saw least of all.

That's the thing I came home with. Not a consensus about AI. A room full of people, each running a different feeling, all pretending the feeling was a fact.

The ATM

Somewhere in all of this, a speaker reached for the comparison I keep hearing, the one that's supposed to calm everyone down.

The ATM.

You've heard it. When the cash machine arrived, everyone was sure it would wipe out bank tellers. Machines doing the human's job. Panic. And look, the story goes, it was fine. The tellers didn't vanish. We've been here before. We always survive the machine.

I get why people reach for it. But it's the wrong comparison, and you don't need to work in banking to see why.

An ATM does one job. It dispenses cash. It knows nothing outside that job. It cannot decide, reason, surprise you, or do a single thing it wasn't explicitly built to do. It is a machine in the oldest sense of the word: a tool that performs an assigned task and holds no knowledge of the world beyond it.

AI is not that. It processes. It decides. It reasons its way toward things nobody handed it a script for. It thinks. When I ask it a question, I don't always know what it's going to say. Nobody who has actually worked with these systems believes they're the ATM. The ATM never once did something its makers didn't expect. This does that before lunch.

So when someone tells me "we panicked about the ATM and we were fine," I understand the instinct. We reach for the last thing that scared us and survived, because a familiar shape is easier to hold than a new one. But the reassurance only works if the two things are the same kind of thing. And they aren't. We have never, in the entire history of our tools, held one that thinks. There is no last time. This is the first time.

Why the Room Can't Agree

And that, I think, is why the room felt the way it felt.

You can trust a thing you can predict. The ATM was easy to make peace with, eventually, because it always did the same thing. Its behavior had edges. But this technology doesn't have those edges yet, and everyone standing on that show floor could feel it. That's why the emotions were so far apart. When the thing in front of you is genuinely new and genuinely uncertain, your feeling about it says more about you than about the thing.

The person certain it will kill us all and the person certain it will save the world are making the same mistake. They're both mistaking a feeling for a fact. They've both let one emotion grab the console and drive. And the reason Trust was the rarest emotion in that building is that trust is the one you can't fake and can't rush. You can't decide to trust something. You can only be shown, over and over, until the fear runs out of evidence.

Where I Land

I don't think the disagreement is a failure. I think it's honest. Twelve thousand smart people looking at something none of us fully understand and admitting, with their wildly different reactions, that we're all still guessing. That's not a room that's confused. That's a room standing at the front edge of something, feeling it before we have the words for it.

But I'll tell you what I didn't hear enough of, and it's the thing I most believe. Trust in this doesn't come from a better keynote or a cleaner analogy. It doesn't come from someone on a stage telling you it's going to be fine. It comes from doing the thing. From using it, badly at first, and then less badly, until the fear you walked in with has been quietly replaced by evidence.

That's how it happened for me. I didn't decide to trust these tools. I built with them, day after day, until trust was just the residue of everything they'd helped me do. Nobody argued me into it. The work did.

So I left that room not more certain about what AI will become. I don't think anyone honest can be. I left more certain about the only emotion that actually helps. Not the fear that freezes you and not the excitement that blinds you. The trust you earn, slowly, by picking the thing up and using it until you know it in your hands.

Twelve thousand people, twelve thousand feelings. The ones who'll be okay aren't the certain ones on either end. They're the ones quietly building trust, one real hour at a time.

Dacia writes about AI for real people at Speak Human. If your console has Fear at the wheel right now, that's allowed. Just don't let it drive forever.