Anyone who watches TV has likely seen the Microsoft ad for its AI technology. It wasn’t long ago that artificial intelligence was considered so difficult to understand—and confined in its usage to highly specialized pursuits—that experts sighed at the thought of having to “dumb it down” to explain it in to consumers and no one thought of it as a selling point.

What, then, does it signify that AI has gone from not being talked about to the widely advertised? Certainly it indicates that, at a minimum, consumers are, generally speaking, somewhat knowledgeable consumer users, as AI would have no meaning to those not knowledgeable regarding computer usage. It may also indicate that consumers are at least minimally comfortable with the generalized issues of AI. Information security, for example, and who has a right to access the personal data of a user or the subject of a digital communication, are issues that have always existed, but have become far more the hot topic with the increase in the number of locations data can be stored (the user’s workstation, a server at a business, Cloud servers and backup servers), and with that increase came the rise in hacking and the number of laws enacted to try to protect such data.