David Colburn

I know. Another column from me about artificial intelligence.
You’re probably thinking, “Didn’t we just do this?” And yes, if you’ve been reading along, we did.
But here’s the thing: I’m not writing about AI because I think it’s some fascinating abstract concept or because I’m an obsessed techie. I’m writing about it because, whether you’ve invited it in or not, AI is already a houseguest in your life, and more often than not, you don’t even know it’s there.
That’s why I keep coming back to it. Not because it’s trending, or because I think we’re all going to be replaced by humanoid chatbots. I keep writing about it because the average person – your neighbor, your grocer, your pastor – is already encountering AI dozens of times a day without realizing it.
To make the point, let’s use a fictional and therefore agreeable neighbor, Mr. Joe Q. Public.
Joe’s not interested in technology. He doesn’t follow the latest AI developments or read white papers. He’s not tinkering with ChatGPT. He’s just living his life – checking the weather, texting his wife, driving to work, stopping for groceries, flipping on a show in the evening.
But AI? AI is everywhere in Joe’s day.
Let’s start with the most universal. Joe opens Google. He types in a simple question, looking for a customer service number, and up pops an “AI-generated summary” right at the top. It looks helpful. Authoritative. But what Joe doesn’t know, and neither does Google’s AI, is that scammers have figured out how to game the system.
They use AI, too, to flood the internet with fake info, which gets scooped up by the AI summary engine and regurgitated back into search results. Some users have already been tricked into calling fake support lines and handed over their credit card info to scammers because the AI served up the wrong number, with Google’s logo stamped above it.
Anyway, while Joe scans his Google results, he gets a text from his boss, and as he replies, his phone helpfully changes “I’ll be right there” to “I’ll be riot there.” That’s autocorrect, a tiny AI model constantly guessing what he meant. Not always correctly.
Now back to his Google results, Joe has managed to get the right number he was looking for and dials up customer service. There’s a 50/50 chance, a coin flip, that the pleasant helpful voice that answers his call is a sophisticated AI chatbot.
Later, Joe yells at his Alexa to turn off the kitchen light, and Alexa, after a dramatic pause and a misunderstanding about “kitchen fight,” obliges. That’s AI. That afternoon, Spotify throws a mellow “yacht rock” wrench into the middle of his workout jams because it has no idea what he’s doing. That’s AI. And when Joe decides to watch a movie, Netflix uses AI to suggest “Somebody Feed Phil” because Joe once watched five minutes of a documentary about cheese.
Joe recognizes those moments. He may roll his eyes or laugh or swear at them, but he knows there’s some sort of tech wizardry involved. It feels artificial. Sometimes intelligent.
But AI’s reach doesn’t stop at the things Joe can see. Most of it, in fact, operates under the hood.
Say Joe pulls out his debit card to buy something online. Ever the romantic, Joe’s trying to buy chocolates from France for his beautiful bride. The transaction gets flagged. Denied. Not because he entered the number wrong, but because AI behind the scenes decided that the purchase didn’t match his normal behavior and might be fraudulent. It was an invisible decision made in milliseconds, not by a person, but by a machine. And it didn’t just block the payment. It forced Joe to stop what he was doing, maybe call the bank, maybe give up altogether.
Later that night, Joe scrolls through Facebook. He’s not seeing a random selection of posts, he’s seeing the ones Mark Zuckerberg’s algorithms thinks he’s most likely to engage with. That means stories that make him nod in agreement or grit his teeth in frustration. AI isn’t just predicting his reactions, it’s shaping his emotional experience of the day.
Now fast-forward to the job market. Joe’s a people kind of guy, and he wants to work in hospitality. He applies for a new position with Hilton hotels by uploading his resume and filling out a form. Before a human ever looks at his application, if one ever does, it’s scanned by an AI filter trained to recognize “strong candidates.”
That filter may favor certain formats, certain schools, certain keywords. It may downgrade him because he’s been out of the workforce for a few years or because he phrased something differently. He never hears back. But if he had, it might have been an AI chatbot calling to conduct an interview, similar to that customer service rep Joe talked to earlier.
And then there’s health insurance – the least fun game most of us will ever play. Only now, Joe’s not playing with a person. Increasingly, AI is the one deciding whether a procedure gets covered. It reviews claims, scans records, and flags treatments as “medically necessary” or not, based on training data, not bedside judgment. More and more, it’s not a nurse or case manager on the other end of the line. It’s an algorithm. And that decision might mean the difference between Joe getting a needed scan or getting a bill for thousands because his claim was denied by AI. That’s not hypothetical. That’s happening now.
This is the stuff I want people to see. Not just the chatbots and the autocorrects, but the full spectrum, which we haven’t even covered here, from the tools we recognize to the unseen gears grinding behind the scenes.
And to be clear, this isn’t all bad. AI fraud detection saves people millions. Smart thermostats cut energy bills. Voice assistants help people with mobility issues. Health monitors on smartwatches have flagged early signs of heart conditions. These are real benefits, and they matter.
But so does transparency. So does understanding. Because not every AI system is built with your best interests in mind. Some are tuned for profit. Some for engagement. Some are based on flawed data. And many are completely unregulated.
That’s why I keep telling you about AI, because this is no longer about some hypothetical future. It’s about Friday. It’s about now.
You don’t have to be a tech person to care. You just have to be a person.
If you’re getting ads that feel like they’re reading your mind, if your insurance rates change without explanation, if your kid’s college essay is flagged for plagiarism when they didn’t cheat, AI is likely involved. If your doctor uses a diagnostic assistant, if your bank denies a loan, if that self-driving semi squeezes you off the road, AI is involved.
Aside from Facebook’s algorithms and those darned ads that follow me around the internet after I’ve searched for something, I never paid any attention to AI until I signed up for ChatGPT two years ago. These days, there’s a new article about AI almost every day on the national news sites I use, and I see how invasive it’s become, how it’s being used for things I’ve always assumed are done by humans. AI is making decisions that affect your lives on a regular basis. So while there are so many things I could write about in my column, you can count on another one about AI in the next few months, because I’m writing about the people you used to know who are now the machines you’re getting to know, whether you like it or not.