Call it a tale of two technology tales.

Forced by the blizzard-slammed NYC streets to cancel Sunday's out and about, I decided to gin up a dinner originally planned for later in the week.

(The recipe, if you like to cook, is Porchetta Pork Roast and comes courtesy of The New York Times' Melissa Clark. Having tried it once, Deb and I agree it's a gem (link at bottom).

Only problem: the roast I picked up at Whole 401K was about half the size of the specified; non-conforming in a number of significant recipe-impacting features.

Result: all the timing calculations were verklempt and since I am far from a professional, that always freaks me out.

Which got me wondering whether ChatGPT could not only rewrite the instruction to accommodate but give me a detailed schedule of events.

You bet it could and did. Not only providing a precision game-plan, but noting this wasn't no longer "porchetta," instead, it was a "precision" roast.

Whatever that means.

Anyway, while waiting for the oven to come to temp (450 for the initial sear) I picked up the Times Sunday Business and the headline, "Tech Leaders Are All In on A.I. The Public Not So Much."

Some gems, of a different sort, for your degustation:

“The creators of a new technology have always sold it as producing a fundamental transformation of human existence. The radio was touted as bringing “perpetual peace.”

“In a YouGov survey last year, more than a third of respondents said they were concerned that AI would end human life on earth.”

“And in the most recent large survey conducted by the National Bureau of Economic Research, 80 percent of firms reported the AI was having no impact on their productivity or employment.”

“The chief salesman of the AI boom, Sam Altman of OpenAI, said there was more resistance to the diffusion, the absorption” of AI into the culture and economy than he expected.”"

“The tech industry hype may seem omnipresent, but Mr. Huang (Nvidia CEO) feels "the battle of the narratives” is being won by the critics.”"

“Adoption (of AI) has plateaued. In the fourth quarter of 2025, 38 percent of employees told Gallup that their workplace had integrated AI technology. That number was essentially unchanged from the third quarter.”

“AI is clearly not technology that is being universally encouraged as inevitable.”

“I can’t really remember a boom with such active hostility to it,” said William Quinn, co-author of “Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles."

And it goes.

So, I have a message for the AI industry and their downstream datacenter partners: you cannot sell people what they already distrust.

You cannot overpromise them into persuasion.

You can, however, give them reasons to explore and discover and even imagine their own doors in.

Something as simple, personal, and, you damn right, as ordinary as finding you only need to roast at 450 for 20 minutes, reduce to 300 for 55, and then crisp at 425 for another 6.

Promised link: https://lnkd.in/eaQVixeY