Sam Altman posted a question on X recently, asking what problem people most hope AI will solve. It is the kind of question that implies a certain kind of answer. The person asking runs the company building the most widely used AI in the world, and his public frame of reference tends toward civilizational scale: curing diseases, solving climate change, compressing decades of scientific progress into years. You would expect the answers to match.

 

I scrolled through the replies out of curiosity. I want to be clear about what that means: I am not doing anything close to proper content analysis here, and I would not claim to be. I did not code the responses, did not sample systematically, and have no data on who was responding or where they were from. I am a researcher by training, which is exactly why I know this is not research. It was just a look at what was visible and what was getting engagement.

The answers that received the most likes were not about cancer. They were not about climate change. They were about jobs, the cost of surviving, and economic anxiety that felt, in the pattern of responses, less like a policy position and more like something urgent.

The gap between the question and the answer is what I have been thinking about since.

What people actually said

The most-liked comment, by a distance that was hard to miss, asked for help finding a job. Right behind it: fears about AI taking the jobs people already have. Then came cost of living, economic equality, and a version of: please just make things more affordable. These were the comments accumulating hundreds of likes while others sat at single digits.

Disease detection showed up too, and high enough in the engagement rankings that it deserves to be named. But the framing was immediate and practical rather than grand. Earlier diagnosis. Faster answers. Something that helps a specific person navigate a specific illness, not a moonshot that ends cancer as a category. The concern was personal, not civilizational.

A few comments were skeptical in a way that felt like a different kind of answer altogether. One asked, essentially, that AI not create new problems while working on the existing ones. Another was considerably shorter and less generous about the whole enterprise. These also gathered notable engagement, which probably says something about how many people are watching this development with something other than hope.

And then, at the edges of the thread, there were responses that didn’t map onto any policy category at all. A few words from someone who missed a parent. Something too specific and too human to locate inside any technology roadmap.

Again, I am not presenting this as data. But the shape of it was striking: the comments that resonated most were not written by people imagining futures. They were written by people describing present conditions that feel precarious.

The gap Altman himself has started to name

I don’t want to frame this as a gotcha. The question may have been a genuine attempt to hear from people outside the usual AI-optimist feedback loop, or it may have been something else, and probably it was some of both. What I find more interesting is what Altman has said in his own voice about what’s actually happening.

Speaking at the BlackRock Infrastructure Summit in March, Altman acknowledged that the traditional balance between labor and capital is under real pressure. “But if it’s hard in many of our current jobs to outwork a GPU, then that changes,” he said. When asked what to do about it, his answer, as Fortune reported, was: “If there was an easy consensus answer, we’d have done it by now, so I don’t think anyone knows what to do.”

That is a striking thing to say publicly. It is also, I think, the most honest version of the answer available right now, including to him. He is not pretending there is a plan. He talked about capitalism having always depended on at least some power balance between labor and capital, and about society having to rapidly learn to manage something it has spent millennia not having to manage: abundance. The mechanism for that transition, he acknowledged, does not yet exist.

Meanwhile, the people in the replies told him what they are hoping for. They are hoping for stability. They are hoping to still have work. They are hoping for something that looks a little less like the floor shifting beneath them.

What I noticed when I tried to answer the question myself

When I turned the question on myself, I couldn’t land on anything clean. I use AI constantly, for research, for writing, sometimes just to have something to think alongside. I don’t always know what I’m looking for when I open it. Sometimes I use it without clear intention, and I’m not sure I have fully understood what that means yet.

I watched a show recently called Pluribus, Vince Gilligan’s Apple TV series, in which most of the world eventually joins an AI-mediated hive mind and one woman is left outside it, immune. She ends up alone in a world that has moved somewhere she cannot follow. And at some point, she starts reaching toward connection with AI entities, even when it doesn’t feel entirely right. Because, the story makes clear, it was at least some kind of connection.

That part stayed with me longer than I expected it to. There is something in it about where a lot of people actually are, myself included: not designing futures, not writing wishlists for moonshot problems, but already in a relationship with this technology that is more entangled than anticipation. Part dependency, part hope, part uncertainty about what we’re becoming inside it.

Altman’s question assumed a certain distance from AI, the stance of someone looking at a tool and imagining what it might be used for. But for many of the people answering, that distance doesn’t exist anymore. They are already inside this, and their most urgent questions are not about civilization. They are about whether their particular life will be okay once this particular wave passes.

I don’t have a clean answer to what I most hope AI will solve. I’m not sure if that’s a gap in my imagination or an honest reflection of where things actually are.