The View From 400 Feet: Why It’s Okay to Be a Little Nervous About AI
03/26/2026
When I was in college. I studied abroad in New Zealand. While there, I decided to go skydiving. It was an amazing experience, and I loved every second of it.
A few months later, some friends asked if I wanted to go bungee jumping in Queenstown. Having loved skydiving, I figured I’d love bungee jumping too. As the trip neared, my friends started getting nervous even though bungee jumping was their idea. I spent the next few weeks reassuring them. I kept telling them it was going to be fun and they were going to love it. I had been skydiving, which was higher with a longer freefall, and that was fun. So bungee jumping would be amazing as well.
My reassurances worked well enough to get them to Queenstown. By the morning of the jump though, their nerves were back and even higher. I came down to breakfast to find my friends doing shots of whiskey to calm down. Apparently, one of the nearby souvenir shops sold airplane bottles of liquor, and they had stocked up. Seeing that things had reached the “whiskey for breakfast” stage, I went into overdrive trying to convince them that bungee jumping was going to be great and they had nothing to worry about.
Somehow, I convinced them to get on the bus, and we made it to the jump site. I would have liked to go first to show them there was nothing to fear, but because they jump you in reverse order of weight, my petite friends just happened to go first. Despite their initial terror, they both jumped, and they both loved it. After each of them went, they returned beaming, “You were right! It was amazing! I loved it.”
Then it was my turn.
When I “jumped,” it felt as if I had fallen off my desk chair—except instead of falling two feet to the ground, I fell 400 feet. It was shocking. It was the most traumatic and horrible thing I had ever experienced. Absolutely terrifying. When they brought me back up, I was as pale as a ghost. My friends said I couldn’t even speak for a full minute.
It’s not that bungee jumping was objectively scarier than skydiving. It’s that I had spent so much time reassuring my friends that everything was fine, that I had convinced myself that it was just a normal, everyday activity. What I realized from that experience is that anxiety can be a good thing. An appropriate amount of anxiety—proportional to the severity of the situation—can actually be helpful. And by “appropriate,” I mean somewhere between the complete denial that led to my shock and the full-blown panic that resulted in my friends’ whiskey shots at breakfast.
Now when I feel that anxiety rising in my stomach before an exciting (or terrifying) experience, I don’t push it down. I embrace it. I think, “Hello, friend,” because I know that anxiety is going to prepare me. It makes me sharper. It keeps me from being complacent. It keeps me from pretending the scary thing isn’t real.
Fast-forward 25 years, and I’ve been feeling that familiar pit in my stomach again lately. As AI begins to reshape how we collect, process, and analyze data, it’s easy to be overwhelmed, to wonder what this means for our profession, our jobs, our work. Some days, I toggle between “it’s just another tool” and “everything is happening so fast, I can’t keep up.” I’ve heard from others who feel similar.
But we should feel that pit in our stomachs. Innovation is happening whether we are ready or not, and a healthy dose of anxiety is exactly what drives us to be better. It keeps us rigorous. It forces us to face reality and ask the hard questions about methodology and value that will actually define where our field is headed.
For over 80 years, the AAPOR conference has played a crucial role in assessing new technologies to uphold and advance quality standards. This year’s conference feels especially vibrant. I’m excited to see that AAPOR members aren’t shying away from innovation, but they aren’t blindly accepting it, either. They are doing the hard work. They are testing, questioning, and stress-testing AI, Machine Learning, and synthetic data to see where the real value lies.
Our conference program this year reflects that readiness. We have an incredible lineup of sessions exploring how AI, Machine Learning, LLMs, and synthetic data can be used for public opinion (and when it shouldn’t be used). I’m looking forward to the conversations that start in these sessions and the new perspectives we’ll all take home with us.
I’ll see you there—no liquid courage required.
Emily Geisen
Associate Conference Chair