Part Awe, Part Apprehension

What a seventeen-year-old got right in 1844, and a focus group reminded me of last month

I read the transcript again.

Derek (leaning in just a bit): "Okay but… serious question, Lauren – are you the kind of person who talks to your cat out loud like it's a roommate? Or do you keep it mysterious and cool?"

Lauren (laughs, a little too fast): "Oh absolutely. Full conversations. Like, 'Fig, can you believe what happened at work?' and he just stares like I'm the dramatic one." (grinning) "You're not judging me for that, right? Or do you talk to your furniture instead?"

Derek: "Only when the coffee machine betrays me. Then it gets personal."

It was a focus group transcript. Eight respondents, mixed, a discussion guide about a product that doesn't matter here. None of this was in the guide, but the moderator let the conversation flow, because ideas are more likely to emerge.

Then Amanda cut in.

Amanda: "Okay wow… they're in their own rom-com over there. Meanwhile I'm still over here trying to figure out if my gummies are actually giving me better skin or if I'm just drinking more water lately."

She'd seen what the other two were doing, said it out loud, and used it to take the moderator's attention back.

Interesting human behaviour. Except…

Amanda wasn't a person. Neither were Derek or Lauren. Nor, for that matter, was the moderator (nor was Lauren's cat, who she had named 'Fig').

In July last year I wrote a newsletter titled Persona Problems, about why AI personas fail as research instruments. The last of the reasons was this: "Above all, they are alone. They 'talk' to users and check responses from their language models, but they do not interact with others."

On the back of that I co-founded a solution and just fifteen months on, a simulated respondent had noticed two other simulated respondents flirting, named it in an idiom her grandmother wouldn't have recognised, and used it to get the room back. Whatever that is, it isn't alone.

I'll admit I've stopped joining the LinkedIn debates about synthetic research. Not because I've lost interest but because the debate has settled into two camps, for and against, and almost nobody in either is taking the time to understand what is actually being built.

Creating synthetic people with their own motivations, emotions and lived experiences is one thing. Trying to mirror real people and check the one against the other is an entirely different thing. They are different methods with different failure modes, and a conversation that can't tell them apart isn't one I can contribute to.

I don't want to overclaim what I felt reading that transcript. It wasn't dread. I co-founded the company that built the room they were sitting in, and I have never once believed we were making something dangerous to anyone. But there is a feeling that sits between awe and alarm and doesn't have a good name, and I had it, and it lasted the rest of the evening.

Last week a client gave it one. Dorota Szablisty, Chief Strategy and Marketing Officer at Publicis Groupe Hungary, wrote on LinkedIn that after a year working with our Simbions it still left her feeling odd. "Part awe, part apprehension." and "...made her look at the world a little differently."

I read that and thought of a girl of seventeen in a room in the US Capitol, in May 1844.

Samuel Morse had promised Annie Ellsworth the first message on the Washington–Baltimore line as a thank-you.

When Congress finally passed his funding bill, she was the one who ran to tell him. On 24 May 1844 she handed him a slip of paper with a verse from the Book of Numbers on it, and he tapped it to Baltimore.

What hath God wrought.

These were the first words on the first long-distance telegraph line.

Almost everyone hears them as a warning. I did, until last week when researching this newsletter, and learned that in the King James text the line ends with an exclamation mark. It is a cry of astonishment, not foreboding. The question mark that now follows it in nearly every retelling was added later, by us, along with the dread.

The problem with warnings about new technology isn't that we ignore them. It's that we cannot tell, at the time, which kind we are hearing. Today we are learning many, from many quarters. For me, it helps to sort them.

Sort the famous ones and they fall into three bins, and the bins are not the same size.

A. Awe we later read as dread.

Ellsworth's verse. And the story that Alfred Nobel founded his prizes after reading his own premature obituary ("the merchant of death is dead"). We wanted an inventor's regret badly enough that we appear to have supplied one.

B. Dread that was right.

This is the bin that should stop anyone saying "we've been here before" too comfortably. Thomas Midgley gave the world leaded petrol in 1921 and CFCs in 1930, and was honoured by his profession for both. Robert Oppenheimer told an audience at MIT in 1947 that "the physicists have known sin." Orville Wright wrote in 1917 that the brothers had dared to hope the aeroplane would make war impossible, and that they had been wrong. Mikhail Kalashnikov said in 2008 that he slept well; in a letter to the Patriarch of Moscow a few years later, published after his death and whose authorship his own daughter thought a priest had helped with, he wrote that his spiritual pain was unbearable. A man can change bins late.

C. Dread about the wrong thing.

In Plato's Phaedrus, the king Thamus tells the god who invented writing that it will breed forgetfulness, because men will trust the marks instead of their memories. In 1545 the Swiss naturalist Conrad Gessner warned of a confusing and harmful abundance of books. Both were right about a cost. Both were wrong about the catastrophe. This is the bin most present fears will end up in. Most. Not all.

Look at the pattern across all three bins. Oppenheimer spoke after Hiroshima. Kalashnikov wrote to a priest. Propst told a newspaper at seventy-six. Thamus wasn't even the inventor; he was the customer.

Every warning in the record arrived afterwards, in private, or from the sidelines.

That is what has no precedent now. The people building the current technology are warning about it while building it.

Researchers resigning in order to speak, the heads of the laboratories signing statements about catastrophic risk, the products shipping with their own hazard sheets. Nothing on the shelf above looks like that.

I can read it two ways from the chair I'm in, and I think both readings are true.

One: the builders have learned from the shelf, and a warning issued before the fact is the only kind that has ever been any use.

Two: a warning that arrives with the product launch is also the most powerful marketing claim ever devised (this is so capable it frightens us…) and the people making it know that. Safeguard and sales pitch, in the same sentence. A fourth bin, and nobody can say yet what goes in it.

Back to the transcript, then, and the honest answer to where my own feeling belongs. I don't know. Pause, not dread, is as precise as I can be, and I've decided that's allowed.

Annie Ellsworth was precise too. She chose a verse that held wonder and unease in the same breath, and punctuated it with astonishment, and we have spent a hundred and eighty years editing her toward fear.

The one who read the room in that group was Amanda. Two words, "okay wow" and then back to her skin. Which is, when you think about it, exactly the ratio the girl in the Capitol chose.

The question mark was never in the original. We added it.

I am a co-founder of Simbioniq.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 1 October 2026 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.