Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI

We are, in the best case scenario, minting a lost generation in real time. This will become increasingly clear over the next 2 years.

Meanwhile, simonw and his retiree friends are having the "time of their lives", so that's good I guess :)

"Many respondents did acknowledge that A.I. might make them more efficient in school and the workplace, he said. But they were concerned about how the technology would affect their creativity and critical thinking skills."

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Perhaps schools need to adapt to AI use and recenter the goals of education in the minds of students. If AI use impairs your development, you are only being efficient in your evasion of education.

i.e. Students need to be taught that learning to efficiently pump out AI written essays isn't the same thing as learning to reason and express themselves. AI tools will evolve and become easier and easier to pick up and use. Using your own mind is a slower and more difficult skill to develop, but it makes the difference between going through life as a human being or a mere meat-puppet for AI. It will always be far easier for a human to pick up AI tools and learn them from scratch than it will for a meat-puppet to remedy their lack of human development.

Reminds me of the quote: No one goes there anymore, it's too crowded.

These types of surveys are pretty much useless. Just go by people's revealed preferences. They're using the technology. They don't have to. I'm sure most teachers and schools would prefer them not to.

Why do they have to use it? Have standards gotten higher in schools such that they will be left behind if they don't? Is there peer pressure to use it? Is there some social aspect I'm unaware of?

Of course not. People find the technology useful. Social media I understand as it's harder to break away because friends use it to communicate. But that's not true for AI.

And then they have some doomer media telling them they should be concerned and scapegoat the technology. Gen AI will prevent you from being an artist or poet?

Yeah, I just don't buy it.

As someone who sees value in generational contracts like older people investing heavily in younger people, with the assumption that they will also take care of us in our older age, I long to improve the lives of subsequent generations. I don't know how we do that when we keep mortgaging their futures with gov't debt and spending that extends beyond the length of the administration.

If I had a genie of many wishes I'd wish for

1. No more deficit spending

2. Budgets cannot exceed prior year's intakes

3. An end to progressive taxation, but an increase in a flat tax rate to pay off all public debt. As the debt is paid a negative tax rate will replace it.

4. All politicians' pay tied to a fixed/capped multiple of the median income in the country

5. The building of a public wealth fund which is built from any benefit granted to a company through the governemnt -- want a tax break or a publicly funded stadium? Give us 50% share in the team. Want a bailout for your bank/automaker? Sell us preferred shares at high rates (to reflect the risk). Want publicly funded power plants for your GPUs? Then we want a share of your AI Company in exchange in our public wealth fund.

6. Forced public liquidity of large companies (say $1B) to ensure the public is able to participate in the overall economy, rather than just private networks of back scratchers

7. Politicians who want to invest must invest in an equal weight russell 3000 (or an even wider spread of US stocks) to ensure vested interest in the country, but divested interest in any specific company/sector.

8. Capped political spend.

9. A concerted effort to move towards known maxima rather than stepping towards local maxima with fear of going through local minima too.

10. A publicly funded opt-in national service program for building houses. If you give 4 years of your life to building houses we'll give you a 2 bed 1 bath and a salary along the way. (Obviously, details tbd, but something along that idea)

It's okay to have two conflicting thoughts about something and both be true at the same time. AI is awesome but at the same time is promising to do evil in the future. Why? Facebook has done a lot of good for the world, like React for instance, but also done a lot of evil as well. Billionaires have initiated the development of some amazing products and services, but at the same time they're spending their money building bunkers so they can survive an end of the world scenario that they're largely responsible for, rather than using it to mitigate some of the evil that they unleashed. Why are they doing that? I don't know. It doesn't seem necessary to me.

I’m a young adult and I’m very hopeful for AI, my partner who is a similar age is very hopeful too. A couple evenings ago, I saw a rocket launch across the sky and last night I saw images of the far side of the moon taken by orbiting astronauts. This is to say I’m very hopeful for the future! I think young people are feeling the pressures of high taxes, high housing costs which driven up by overregulation, entitlements to retirees and H1B/immigrant cases driving down wages. I think this is what causes some young people to feel cautious about AI. The company I work for is constantly hiring fresh faced new graduates who use AI tools to enable higher productivity and reduce time performing data analysis. At the same time I see young people frustrated when their cars get broken into or when they get robbed and criminals are not held accountable. My take on this is that legacy media refuses to address these issues or plays them down and at the same time they amplify concerns about AI probably because AI is supplanting the reach and their rhetoric and reducing their ad share. I also see AI tools as a framework to promote equality and to uplift people, my example is that colleges and governments promoted a “learn to code” movement for people in non SWE roles, but with AI tools heavily helping with code generation there’s classes now that teach coding aided by AI because for most people coding is a means to an end (1) so there’s less pressure on people who are working and going to school to excel in these difficult courses and graduate on time.

1 - https://careertraining.smc.edu/training-programs/c-plus-plus...

oh what? you don't say??

I love using AI tools and they are changing my work and life in amazing ways. I cannot imagine going back. And yet, I am more concerned about the social damage due to their widespread use and the amounts of slop they generate. Just this week: - There was an article about a news company faking polls by asking LLMs for answers. - My wife told me that she stopped watching any funny pet videos because 99% now is AI slop - start normal, but then turn into someone's slop idea. - A friend told me their big tech company uses AI-generated metrics as part of performance evaluation. Nobody checks them. - Another friend told me their big tech company requires engineers to use AI-generated commit messages with terrible signal-to-noise ratio and making version control and history useless for engineers. But directors and PMs love them, they are so descriptive! - My neighbor uses LLMs to create some neighbor meeting plans/agendas, plausibly looking PDFs citing contractors etc. It's impossible to read through it, mixed hallucinations and real information, all wrapped in thousands of slop words. What is real and what made up? I'll spend 10x more time double guessing. - Encountering more and more articles and general "content" that is AI generated and looks ok at the first glance, but slop upon inspections. Why would I read LLMs output on a webpage with ads, if I can ask it myself and get better, personal answers and style?

And I am not even talking here about other ethical issues, training data, less junior job positions, job replacement of journalists with LLM-equipeed contractors, etc.

LLMs make my personal and work life so much better, but social life unbearable. Is it worth the trade-off? I guess it doesn't matter at this point.

It’s possible they do not appreciate how AI will help some rich fucks siphoning all the money out of the economy and into their bank accounts.

Yeah well maybe that has something to do with entry level jobs drying up, ostensibly due to AI.

I don’t even think that’s actually the case - we’re in a soft recession. AI has nothing to do with it. But that’s not what kids are being told.

Great marketing campaign guys. Just wait. If you think sentiment around AI is negative now you haven’t seen shit.

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Why would they be angry that companies would rather burn money in AI data centers then hire them? /s

AI is just another disruptive technology like the loom, the steam engine or the airplane. It will take time to adjust and some industries will go away and others will pop up.

I think a lot of people are conflating two ongoing things: the emergence of AI and stagnant (if not recessionary) economies across the globe. It appears as if AI is resulting in so much more negative externalities but in reality if not for AI, we'd 100% be in a recession.

Yeah, no kidding, the tech bros have utterly botched the rollout of this technology. It's the pinnacle of human innovation. It should be revered as our greatest achievement. People should know about how its going to revolutionize scientific research. Instead, they opted for regulatory capture in lieu of addressing people's concerns, using robber-baron techniques to force data center construction in at-risk communities, made it clear they want to replace human workers, and then shoved its art slop capabilities in front of everybody's faces.

If I'm Gen Z, especially someone who is graduating or just graduated, I'd be very angry at AI too.

Even in our own organization, we've almost stopped hiring juniors and interns completely. We just leverage AI more and more.

So I can understand how most Gen Zs feel threatened by AI.

There are basically 2 groups who are loving AI:

* Seniors who have deep knowledge so AI is just there to help make them accomplish their goals cheaper and faster

* Gen Zs who are starting their own businesses and have embraced AI

My advice to young people is to embrace AI as fully as you can. Learn to be extremely productive with it. Learn to use it to create businesses. Burying your head in the sand hoping AI will collapse is not going to work in their favor.

PS. You can get a pretty good idea of how young people view AI on Reddit. Reddit users tend to be younger, less affluent. Save for a few subs, most of Reddit is very anti-AI. I'd guess most of them wish AI will collapse soon so they can go back to a world where human intelligence matter more.

You can still milk the react/Vercel andies, they will never get tired of being exploited even if the whole world turns against AI.