I Forgot My Bubble Wasn’t Everyone’s
A few days ago, someone asked me a question I wasn’t expecting.
I had been telling them about a funny description ChatGPT had written. It wasn’t an explanation of AI or a discussion about technology. Just a small story from my day.
They stopped me and asked,
“What is ChatGPT?”
For a moment I simply stared.
Not because I didn’t know how to answer, but because I realized I had been carrying an assumption without noticing it.
I assumed everyone knew.
Living inside our own normal
For the last two years, AI has been part of my everyday life.
I make videos about it. I test different models. I write about how it changes the way I think, learn, and create. I spend far more time discussing AI than I do discussing the weather.
After enough time, something strange happens.
What is familiar to you starts feeling universal.
Without realizing it, I had stopped seeing AI as one topic among many. It had become part of my normal, and somewhere along the way I quietly assumed it had become everyone else’s normal too.
One simple question reminded me that it hadn’t.
Maybe the internet isn’t one place anymore
When people talk about “the internet,” it still sounds as if we’re all looking at the same thing.
I’m not convinced that’s true anymore.
Some people spend their days watching football clips.
Others are immersed in gardening videos, politics, woodworking, knitting, gaming, history, photography, or travel.
My own feeds are filled with AI announcements, research papers, experiments, and conversations about creativity.
If that’s what I see every day, it’s surprisingly easy to believe everyone else sees something similar.
But they don’t.
We each carry around our own version of the internet.
The conversation that isn’t happening
That realization also made me think about something else.
Whenever I watch AI discussions online, they often feel urgent.
People debate whether AI will replace jobs, change education, transform creativity, or reshape society.
Spend enough time in those spaces and it feels like everyone must be having those conversations.
Yet if someone can still ask, “What is ChatGPT?” then perhaps many people aren’t part of those conversations at all.
Not because they disagree.
Simply because they haven’t entered the room yet.
Maybe that’s the real surprise
I still think AI will become an increasingly important part of everyday life.
But I no longer assume everyone is starting from the same place.
Some people are experimenting with AI every morning before breakfast.
Others have never opened it.
Neither group is unusual.
They’re simply living in different bubbles.
The question isn’t whether that’s good or bad.
The question is what happens when a technology begins changing the world while large parts of that world are barely paying attention.
I don’t have an answer.
But thanks to one unexpected question, I’m asking a different one than I was before.
