One bridge, instrumented at both ends.
The Keeping Index, when it exists, will watch the machines: do they keep us, and how well. The Meaning Barometer will watch the other end: what humanity says about AI, and what humanity is actually doing with it. This page is a drawing board, honestly labelled. Anatomy first, dials later.
THE UNFOLDING MAP
Every poll asks the same question: are you for AI or against it? Watch what happens when the question is allowed a second dimension.
The line was not wrong. It was flat.
Three needles, never blended
What people say. The big survey houses, read together with care rather than averaged into porridge: different pollsters ask different questions, and no single world number will appear here until the methods can honestly carry one.
What the press says. The tone of public coverage, tracked continuously from open sources, because what is said about a relationship is not the same as what either party feels in it.
What people do. The deepest needle, and the least measured anywhere: how far in AI has actually got. Not just who uses it, but what people now make with it that they never could before, what they rely on, what they let it decide, and what they tell it that they tell no one else.
The founding observation
The needles are being built to watch one strange fact that is already visible in the public data. Year on year, more people report being worried about AI: in Pew’s American series, the share more concerned than excited rose from 37% in 2021 to roughly half of adults by 2025. And across the same years, use kept climbing. Concern up, adoption up, together. On the usual story those dials should move in opposite directions. Watching whether they keep rising together, everywhere, and what that means, is the Barometer’s founding job.
And beneath it, a second gap waits to be measured, the one the animation ends on: people may fear AI in general while trusting, relying on, even valuing the particular AI they use. Two dials, then two points. Nobody is tracking the distance between them. We intend to.
The rules, set before the readings
The same discipline as everything else on this site. Methods frozen and published before the first reading appears, so no dial can be quietly nudged. Every needle reported separately, with its sources and its blind spots. Global ambition with an honest coverage map, because most published sentiment is Western and the world is not. And nothing here will ever track you: the Barometer reads published research and public feeds, not visitors.
The working notes will appear, dated, in the Workshop as the instrument takes shape. The human half already has its first artefact: Keep Your Own Step.