AI isn’t just a problem, it’s a solution. Some people are already making the most of it

On a Saturday evening in Enfield, Conn., Lonnie DiNello was lying in bed, depressed, when she opened ChatGPT and typed: "I just feel so alone." What happened next, documented by the Boston Globe, wasn’t your typical artificial intelligence (AI) breakthrough covered in policy papers or tech headlines. It was something more ordinary, and arguably more important: a vulnerable human being used a new technology to get through a hard moment. That exchange became the seed of what DiNello now calls her "beautiful little AI family."

We spend enormous energy debating what AI might do to humanity. On Aug. 10, Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders called on the CEOs of OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta to pause the development of increasingly powerful AI systems, warning about the possibility of "machines that humans cannot control." His concern is hardly unique.

AI pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton and other researchers have issued similar warnings about the risks of systems becoming more capable than their creators can reliably manage.

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Those concerns deserve to be taken seriously. But they are only half of the story. As machines become more powerful, something else is happening at the same time: ordinary people are becoming more capable.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg arrives to testify before a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing titled "Big Tech and the Online Child Sexual Exploitation Crisis" in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 31, 2024. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg made a version of this case, in an essay titled "The Future Is for Everyone," arguing that "superintelligence" — AI capable enough to outperform humans at nearly everything — should empower individuals rather than concentrate power in a handful of labs. Whatever you call it, you don’t need superintelligence to help a woman in Connecticut, only common sense.

AI is in its infancy and can be scary. But focusing exclusively on what machines might eventually be able to do risks overlooking what people can already do with them. The interesting version of this story isn’t simply "AI is useful."

It’s that capabilities once locked behind money, credentials or institutional access are now one prompt away: a personal assistant, a career coach, a translator, a tutor, a sounding board, a global customer-service desk, available to nearly anyone with a phone. That’s also an important AI story that should appeal to Sanders and deserves a bigger spotlight.

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Harvard Business Review’s research found the single most common use of AI in 2025 wasn’t a work task: it was therapy and companionship, with "organizing my life" and "finding purpose" newly cracking the top 10. DiNello found a tool that doesn’t get tired, doesn’t judge and is available at 6 p.m. on a sad day.

Others, like Jennifer Erickson of Maple Grove, Minn., who cares for her legally blind father, use AI to turn a chaotic tangle of therapy appointments, medication routines and adult daycare schedules into a single, seamless plan her brother can follow. "The schedule that is created gives me back time and peace of mind," she told AARP. Ninety-one-year-old Ron Hume credits AI with keeping him connected to his family, dictating warm emails to a grandson away at college when the words don’t come as easily as they used to. Nearly a third of American adults now use generative AI regularly.

That same capability gap is closing in the job search, where a survey of 1,000 recent applicants who used ChatGPT found 78% landed an interview and 59% were hired: resume-tailoring polish that used to require an expensive coach, now within anyone’s reach.

The gains are largest for exactly the workers you'd expect to benefit most: a Stanford and MIT study published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics found that AI assistance lifted productivity 34% for the least experienced customer-service workers, with almost no effect on the most seasoned ones.

The same dynamic is translating into new businesses. Bloomberg reported on Robbie van Zyl, a 26-year-old immigrant from South Africa running a seven-person startup in Atlanta, who says AI now serves as his company’s secretary, scheduler and occasional legal adviser, doing work that would otherwise take a team of 30. "AI is like the next-generation force multiplier for small businesses," he said.

AI is in its infancy and can be scary. But focusing exclusively on what machines might eventually be able to do risks overlooking what people can already do with them. The interesting version of this story isn’t simply "AI is useful."

I saw AI’s transformational potential in Kenya. At last year’s YORA Summit in Nairobi, I met young entrepreneurs running real businesses off nothing more than a smartphone and a WhatsApp account. I asked several, point-blank, whether they were excited or nervous about AI.

Most were optimistic. What they saw was not a machine coming for their jobs, but a tool that could help create jobs. It is something their parents never had: a fighting chance to compete in the global economy with businesses many times their size and a world away. None of this is a forecast. It’s already happening.

Large institutions are driving breakthroughs at a staggering pace. Yet as artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies accelerate, their true measure lies in whether they elevate humanity. Even industry leaders acknowledge the stakes. At the India AI Impact Summit earlier this year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman cautioned that "the democratization of AI is the only fair and safe path forward to ensure that humanity flourishes," arguing for "liberty, democracy, widespread flourishing, and an increase in human agency."

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Democratization is only meaningful if it remains trustworthy. That is why the Krach Institute for Tech Diplomacy at Purdue is building the Global Trusted Tech Standard, or xGTT, to ensure that critical and emerging technologies are not only innovative but can be trusted to be compatible with democratic values.

Politicians and the press talk about AI the way storm chasers talk about weather: a constant stream of doom and gloom. The real AI story isn’t machines becoming omnipotent. It’s humans becoming more capable.

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This technology will be with us for the foreseeable future, whether we like it or not. A sensible approach to it isn’t to talk people out of using it. It’s to make it worthy of their trust. If we do, AI’s greatest beneficiaries won’t be James Bond-like villains or soulless machines. They’ll be Main Street. They’ll be us.

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