7 ms·

Gen Z Resentment Toward AI Grows as Adoption Stagnates and Workplace Fears Mount

97 points by mgh2 5mo ago

kristianp 5mo ago
> While the majority of Gen Zers (51%) still use the technology weekly, growth has slowed to a crawl, increasing only four percentage points over the past year. This stagnation in adoption is accompanied by a sharp decline in positive sentiment. Sell NVIDIA!!!
black_13 5mo ago
[dead]
trolleski 5mo ago
No one cares about GenZ or any others, the AI is for the billionaires.
- mgh2 5mo ago
  Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.
  - Hamuko 5mo ago
    But Sam Altman told me that AI is about to replace most of the employees, so the data center GPUs will just be funding themselves.
  - 10xDev 5mo ago
    Too big to fail. If big tech fails, America goes down with it so it will never happen. Other people will pay the price.
    - mgh2 5mo ago
      Not Apple
  - trolleski 5mo ago
    They're selling AGI, Thiel's 'last company', etc. And the Spineless Generation loves it, makes the number go up.
- rvz 5mo ago
  The AI is for the "billionaires". The billionaires do not give AI to their own kids, just like how they don't give them phones, social media or a games console until they are old enough. AI psychosis is real and the billionaires who own the AI chatbots know this.
xiphias2 5mo ago
Token cost started increasing exponentially for frontier LLMs, and they improved mostly on coding tasks incredibly over the last half year while staying behind in non-verifiable tasks. The main social problem with automation in general was that less intelligent people have been left behind as only boring physical tasks are left for them to do, and people don't generally want to go back destroying their body from the prospects of an office job. At some point frontier AI will only getting only worthwile to use for only super highly intelligent and motivated AI researchers which is a tiny part of the population.
- ekjhgkejhgk 5mo ago
  > less intelligent people have been left behind May I also add that this isn't just (or at all) about intelligence. I'm lucky enough to be at a company where I have a large budget in terms of what I can spend in tokens. This gives me an enormous advantage over someone who is just as intelligent as me and who has the same experience as me minus the interaction I have with LLMs. In this case the crucial difference is not intelligence, it's that I found myself in the right place to be able to go up, whereas a lot of people which are otherwise like me didn't get that opportunity through no fault of their own. People tend to attribute their successes to their own merit and their failures to happenstance, but if we're honest with ourselves the real world has a lot of randomness in it.
  - xiphias2 5mo ago
    You're totally right, I probably simplified the problem too much. At the same people don't just get randomly assigned to companies, and I know I would quickly switch if I would be working at a company which doesn't have this policy.
- twoodfin 5mo ago
  Token cost or token demand?
roenxi 5mo ago
> ...while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology... 31% seems remarkably high. Here we seem to be running up against the limitations of statistics. It is hard to interpret whether this is a scared-and-angry sort of angry or if there is something AI-related happening that is making them angry. I might have been lucky in my experiences, but generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing".
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago
  [dead]
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  > generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing" Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact. Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.
  - ben_w 5mo ago
    > Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact. What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all*, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom. Or both. Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill. Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now. * xAI obviously doesn't care about reputational risk, porn, trolling, propaganda, but this isn't the same question as doom.
feverzsj 5mo ago
They can still do gig works for training AI until AI replaces all the gig workers.
aetherspawn 5mo ago
I want the world to go back to the way it was before, so I’m going to boycott it. Sue me, I have that right.
- redsocksfan45 5mo ago
  Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.
  - abc123abc123 5mo ago
    The amish seem to be quite happy.
    - lostmsu 5mo ago
      You mean "OK". Or did you see evidence that they are specifically quite happy?
      - zer0tonin 5mo ago
        Seasonality of mood and behavior in the Old Order Amish (Raheja & al), shows reduced rates of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the Amish population. So at least they are quite happy during winter.
    - danaris 5mo ago
      The Amish are a cult. Some of them are quite happy! Others are miserable; many are abused. It's a high-control group, that raises its children to believe the outside world as a terrible, scary place, and they are the only safe place to be. Many people are happy in cults, or they couldn't function. But that doesn't mean that the cults are, overall, a positive thing.
      - 5mo ago
dauertewigkeit 5mo ago
We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario. I love the cognitive dissonance. Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- twoodfin 5mo ago
  Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable. And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life. Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.
  - microtonal 5mo ago
    A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable. A bit of a tangential anecdote from my dad, who is a retired a biologist. He was one of the first in the department to use a computer in the 1970s and wrote some programs to do tedious calculations that had to be done by hand before and took days of human labor. Even a 1970s computer could finish the calculations with his programs in a few minutes. His boss, an older tenured professor, could not believe that 'these damn computers' can possibly be right. Doing the same calculations in a few minutes? Impossible. So for a few weeks (or months, I forget), he did all the calculations done on the computer by hand to prove that the computer must be wrong. One day he comes to my dad and says "can you show me how to use one of these computers?"
  - 5mo ago
rvz 5mo ago
This is AGI.
- keyle 5mo ago
  Care to explain?
  - rvz 5mo ago
    It depends on who you talk to: For AI researchers, it is an understanding of what "intelligence" is and the emergence of an autonomous system that surpasses all human capabilities that learns over time. For most AI labs like OpenAI and their investors, it used to mean an intelligent system that surpasses all human capabilities at economically useful work, then it meant $100B dollars of profits, now it is an IPO. For Big Tech, it is digital employees and AI data-centers to "streamline" operations. To everyone else, it is mass job displacement and unemployment. For GenZ, it is "permanent underclass". So it depends on who you are talking to and varies. Therefore "AGI" at this point is meaningless.
keyle 5mo ago
[dead]
bsenftner 5mo ago
This Gen Z resentment is manufactured, so there is yet another pool of people that are angry enough to deludedly back the next aggressive idiot "savior", justifying an attack on the general population, ensuring authoritarianism is viewed to be the "only way forward."
- tavavex 5mo ago
  Yes, because the current pro-AI leaders, CEOs, politicians etc. are anything but authoritarian, right? Think of the rights of the freedom-loving billionaires and their world-scale network of power! What you should really worry about is this imaginary authoritarian anti-AI figure I just came up with.
aaron695 5mo ago
[dead]
solenoid0937 5mo ago
Incredibly sad how many people have no concept of collective achievement, or an understanding of what technological progress buys all of humanity. It always comes at a cost, and it's the reason we aren't dying of starvation and plague in a cold winter field at the age of 45. I guess cynicism is trendy.
- microtonal 5mo ago
  Technology is not value-less. There is technology with good effects on society and technology with bad effects on society. I think very few people who are against, say, surveillance capitalism are against antibiotics. It is a completely coherent position to like most technological progress, but at the same time be critical of some uses of ML/AI. You are just making straw men here by suggesting that people that are critical of AI are critical of all technology.
  - solenoid0937 5mo ago
    AI is fundamentally automation of labor, and to be opposed to AI instead of preparing our systems for a post-labor world is dangerously misguided - especially with historical context on what automation of labor has done for humanity.
    - microtonal 5mo ago
      AI is fundamentally automation of labor, Well, yes, but if humans need to stay in the loop (as most previous automations of labor), it is also moving the means of production into the hands of a small number of tech companies. In 2010 or 2020, anyone with a laptop could create a startup. It might be the case that in 2030, you could only do so if the major frontier model providers allow you to do so and do not make it so expensive that it's only usable by entrenched players. I am not fundamentally against AI, on the contrary, but I think the models should be in the hands of the wider population (i.e. open weight models), so that everyone has the means of production and can benefit from the automation. Also, it would only be fair, since the models are trained on the collective output of humanity. Of course, there are several barriers currently. There are pretty good open models, but running the near-frontier versions requires a lot of capital in the form of GPUs.
kshahkshah 5mo ago
The actual study doesn’t compare between generations. So I’ve know way of knowing if GenZs attitudes are much different comparatively. Interesting results regardless when they compare the shift of 2025 to 2026
amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
I just wish we would stop calling LLMs AI.
- tyleo 5mo ago
  To what end?
  - madaxe_again 5mo ago
    I think he means the generalisation of the subcategory to the category.
  - amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
    It confuses people. The same way calling what Tesla does full self driving. What people envision as "full self driving" or "artificial intelligence", and what they actually get are not the same thing. When I hear artificial intelligence, I picture Data from Star Trek, not a hopped up Eliza.
- anal_reactor 5mo ago
  I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!
DarenWatson 5mo ago
The way we phrase anger with AI doesn't convey the structural realities of what's going on in the knowledge work chain. Gen Z aren't suddenly becoming anti-tech they are acting financially rationally to protect their own economic future. In the past there was an implicit contract for white-collar employment that was based on the concept of earned experience through a period of manufacturing type work. You enter your profession by performing uninteresting, low-paying manufacturing tasks (such as, writing boilerplate type code or performing low-level quality assurance) while you gain domain expertise and gain the perspective necessary to perform high-value work at a higher level. LLMs are now exceptionally good at consuming the 20% of an employees entry-level responsibilities. What I see happening in the enterprise is that management is using AI to justify pulling the ladder up behind them and closing the door behind them. When a senior engineer's or senior analyst's productivity has increased by 30% due to using LLMs, the executive's response is typically not great, we have more time to work on bigger projects, but instead great, we can freeze junior hiring for 2 years. The entry-level positions in the labor force are being automated, causing seriously low access to those roles for the Gen Z workforce. On the other hand, most senior-level positions are not being available to Gen Z workers as they lack the skills and experience required to qualify for those positions. Stagnation in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is the direct result of having no entry or junior level employees to work underneath senior staff members, causing a bottleneck for seniors. Employees generating raw output with AI technology have to check the results (output) for accuracy before integrating into work systems and processes as there are no entry-level employees to provide assistance to senior workers. Gen Z workers do not dislike the tool (AI) however, they do not like how the tool is being implemented and used currently. Currently, the implementation of AI is driven by cost cutting in terms of labor rather than being focused on providing training and developing Gen Z's human capital for future use.
- jerrythegerbil 5mo ago
  Pretty sure the article explicitly stated the resentment is due to their clearly stated concerns continually being explained away. Was your intention to be an example for resentment? Or are you an AI model demonstrating the embodiment of deserving of the resentment? A voice is being demanded. Being louder and longer is exhausting to endure. Stop rewording and reworking the reasons into something with shape and direction, that only serves to strip the voice demanding being heard. It was written as it was meant. Slop is worse than a carbon copy, of a copy, of a copy.
kypro 5mo ago
I worry and feel so much for people younger than me. As someone who entered the workforce during the GFC things were hard, but I always felt like you could make smart decisions, make decent money and build a decent life. Additionally there were plenty of interesting jobs out there around this time that required real skill and effort which you could become an expert in. Software was really hard pre-2010. You actually had to study it because there was no AI, no stackoverflow, no NPM, etc, etc. You had to learn how to write code the hard way, typically from people who already knew how or text books, and more importantly, learn how to solve real problems often applying maths (i.e. you couldn't import a library to find the shortest path in a graph). Similarly video editing, graphic design, 3d modelling, music production, were some other fields which were really hard. Again, there was no YouTube tutorials or AI and even the software itself was so limited compared to what we have today. You had to spend years learning the craft which meant the skill difference between those who had put years into their thing and those who had not was enormous. I miss that world so much... I liked not being good at things and finding people who had what seemed like inhuman talent at things. I had a friend who was insanely good at graphic design and the stuff they'd send me would blow me away. The level of detail and precision didn't even seem possible to me. But now I can generate something almost just as good with AI. Other examples would be how people who spent years practising music are now indistinguishable from someone with AI. Or how people who spent years learning blender are producing models which are indistinguishable from someone with a Meshy subscription. There's just no reason to dedicate yourself to anything anymore and even if you did you're probably not going to get a job anyway. I am a hardcore AI doomer, but assuming the doom scenario isn't on the table and we simply see a concentration in wealth and mass white-collar job losses, I know I'd probably be fine or maybe even benefit from that because I grew up in a time where it was hard but very much possible to acquire a talent and use it to build wealth. Gen Z on the other hand stand no chance. Today's job market feels corrupt and product of pure luck. You either get extremely lucky and somehow land a good job, or know someone who can get you through the door. In the last year I've interview some insanely talented people from the best universities and we have decided not to employ them because we just don't need to. It's honestly hard for me to comprehend being that motivated and working that hard to struggle to even find an entry level job at the relatively mediocre company I work for... We need to question if more productivity is always good. It seems to me the way that productivity is distributed is essential. If it's largely just corporations benefitting from the productivity gains then we're creating a world that's not suitable for humans. This will create a world in which productivity, and therefore wealth, will concentrate to fewer and fewer people, whilst the average person struggles to find ways to demonstrate their employability. If AI is creating a world that is much richer by some metrics, but much poorer by most the average person cares about, then is it even a technology worth having? Why would Gen Z consent to this world we're building and not seek to overthrow (rightly imo) those who have created it? Technology is suppose to make our lives better not make them harder and financially suppress us.
alecco 5mo ago
AI (even if pseudo-AI) is already a huge productivity multiplier and becoming better... but due to demand also becoming more expensive. And if things keep going this way, only corporations with deep pockets and the top 1% will be able to afford it upfront. I wish Gen Z channeled their anger into making distributed AI instead of turning their backs on the problem or doing protests that will get nowhere since Boomers are still the biggest voting block. small + local + distributed Where is the Gen Z hacker movement? The very few into AI are all sellouts wishing they could join a big lab.
metalman 5mo ago
make no mistake, this is not "resentment" this is a collapse of faith, which having recently experienced myself, is what happens when the expectation is that the frog should do the right thing™, and climb out, stoke the fire (just a little bit), and climb back in the pot
euroderf 5mo ago
Eventually it will dawn on most people that it is time once again to shorten the standard work week. Until then it's all talking in circles.
- Timon3 5mo ago
  Unfortunately it seems like the winds are blowing in the opposite direction - the German government for example is trying to move us to a 48-hour-week instead.
- surgical_fire 5mo ago
  I would love that. But that is not going to happen. We would need tangible, meaningful productivity improvements for it to be possible. LLMs are sort of moderately useful, but companies adopting it see no real productivity increase (they see cost increase however). In many ways it is a bullshit technology, being marketed way beyond its capabilities.
  - sillyfluke 5mo ago
    >But that is not going to happen. I don't think the 8-hour work day was accepted during the industrial revolution because job providers were convinced of productivity gains. It was won due to the leverage the labor unions and workers had over job providers. The whole thing rests on whether workers can maintain their leverage in the AI era. That leverage is being eroded by the attempt by job providers to decouple humans from production and productivity (whether they will be succesful in this iteration is, as you say, debatable). The other axis is the attempt to erode democratic norms in order to prevent the majority from checking the power of a wealthy minority. Once those two points of leverage are completely eroded, the only leverage left is mob power. And as history has shown on multiple occasions, excercising that leverage is ugly and messy.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
    - surgical_fire 5mo ago
ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
Month old post OP; Discussion then: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443 and related: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47963163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47963163
deferredgrant 5mo ago
[flagged]
silexia 5mo ago
There certainly is a problem of p companies laying people off and not making new hires, but there is a bigger problem in that this is the most dangerous technology in human history and could lead to our extinction in the next year or two.

97 points by mgh2 5mo ago

> While the majority of Gen Zers (51%) still use the technology weekly, growth has slowed to a crawl, increasing only four percentage points over the past year. This stagnation in adoption is accompanied by a sharp decline in positive sentiment. Sell NVIDIA!!!

black_13 5mo ago

[dead]

trolleski 5mo ago

No one cares about GenZ or any others, the AI is for the billionaires.

mgh2 5mo ago
Unless the next generation avoids it en masse, only leaving niche users like coders and executives pushing down their employee's throats. This usage is not enough to justify ROI on data centers, eventually leading to bankruptcy due to debt, taking down heavily invested Big Tech with it. This is the way.
- Hamuko 5mo ago
  But Sam Altman told me that AI is about to replace most of the employees, so the data center GPUs will just be funding themselves.
- 10xDev 5mo ago
  Too big to fail. If big tech fails, America goes down with it so it will never happen. Other people will pay the price.
  - mgh2 5mo ago
    Not Apple
- trolleski 5mo ago
  They're selling AGI, Thiel's 'last company', etc. And the Spineless Generation loves it, makes the number go up.
rvz 5mo ago
The AI is for the "billionaires". The billionaires do not give AI to their own kids, just like how they don't give them phones, social media or a games console until they are old enough. AI psychosis is real and the billionaires who own the AI chatbots know this.

xiphias2 5mo ago

Token cost started increasing exponentially for frontier LLMs, and they improved mostly on coding tasks incredibly over the last half year while staying behind in non-verifiable tasks. The main social problem with automation in general was that less intelligent people have been left behind as only boring physical tasks are left for them to do, and people don't generally want to go back destroying their body from the prospects of an office job. At some point frontier AI will only getting only worthwile to use for only super highly intelligent and motivated AI researchers which is a tiny part of the population.

ekjhgkejhgk 5mo ago
> less intelligent people have been left behind May I also add that this isn't just (or at all) about intelligence. I'm lucky enough to be at a company where I have a large budget in terms of what I can spend in tokens. This gives me an enormous advantage over someone who is just as intelligent as me and who has the same experience as me minus the interaction I have with LLMs. In this case the crucial difference is not intelligence, it's that I found myself in the right place to be able to go up, whereas a lot of people which are otherwise like me didn't get that opportunity through no fault of their own. People tend to attribute their successes to their own merit and their failures to happenstance, but if we're honest with ourselves the real world has a lot of randomness in it.
- xiphias2 5mo ago
  You're totally right, I probably simplified the problem too much. At the same people don't just get randomly assigned to companies, and I know I would quickly switch if I would be working at a company which doesn't have this policy.
twoodfin 5mo ago
Token cost or token demand?

roenxi 5mo ago

> ...while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology... 31% seems remarkably high. Here we seem to be running up against the limitations of statistics. It is hard to interpret whether this is a scared-and-angry sort of angry or if there is something AI-related happening that is making them angry. I might have been lucky in my experiences, but generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing".

redsocksfan45 5mo ago
[dead]
JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing" Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact. Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.
- ben_w 5mo ago
  > Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact. What I can't decide, for Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, is if the part which is BS is that they don't take the doom risk seriously at all*, or if the BS is that despite taking it seriously they think they are best placed to actually solve the doom. Or both. Meta at least it is obvious they don't even understand the potential of AI, neither for good nor ill. Google and Microsoft seem to be treating it as normal software, with normal risks. If they have doom opinions, they are drowned out by all the other news going on right now. * xAI obviously doesn't care about reputational risk, porn, trolling, propaganda, but this isn't the same question as doom.

feverzsj 5mo ago

They can still do gig works for training AI until AI replaces all the gig workers.

aetherspawn 5mo ago

I want the world to go back to the way it was before, so I’m going to boycott it. Sue me, I have that right.

redsocksfan45 5mo ago
Nobody will sue you for that. In every age we have had people like you, wishing things would go back to "normal", and w.r.t. technology you lot never get your way, but neither do you cause problems for anybody else. All you're doing is pissing into the wind and getting yourself wet, as is your right.
- abc123abc123 5mo ago
  The amish seem to be quite happy.
  - lostmsu 5mo ago
    You mean "OK". Or did you see evidence that they are specifically quite happy?
    - zer0tonin 5mo ago
      Seasonality of mood and behavior in the Old Order Amish (Raheja & al), shows reduced rates of Seasonal Affective Disorder in the Amish population. So at least they are quite happy during winter.
  - danaris 5mo ago
    The Amish are a cult. Some of them are quite happy! Others are miserable; many are abused. It's a high-control group, that raises its children to believe the outside world as a terrible, scary place, and they are the only safe place to be. Many people are happy in cults, or they couldn't function. But that doesn't mean that the cults are, overall, a positive thing.
    - 5mo ago

dauertewigkeit 5mo ago

We are building general thinking machines with the aim of replacing all human labour, ... but humans won't be replaced, they will find other jobs, because when we introduced tractors they were able to find other jobs, ... totally the same scenario. I love the cognitive dissonance. Even in the best case scenario where the generated wealth will be distributed, and somehow we will be able to keep them in check (unlikely), what would be the point of life in a world where machines can best us at everything?

deleted 5mo ago
[deleted]
twoodfin 5mo ago
Technology has been replacing manual and mental labor for millennia, and especially in the last 150 years. A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable. And all the benefits that brings. Not just in raw economic terms, but in quality of (family, community, recreational, commercial, ecological, medical) life. Kind hard to imagine it will suck if another order-of-magnitude leap along that long line happens.
- microtonal 5mo ago
  A farmer or accountant from 1875 would be utterly shocked by how much we depend on machines and the social and industrial instituitions they enable. A bit of a tangential anecdote from my dad, who is a retired a biologist. He was one of the first in the department to use a computer in the 1970s and wrote some programs to do tedious calculations that had to be done by hand before and took days of human labor. Even a 1970s computer could finish the calculations with his programs in a few minutes. His boss, an older tenured professor, could not believe that 'these damn computers' can possibly be right. Doing the same calculations in a few minutes? Impossible. So for a few weeks (or months, I forget), he did all the calculations done on the computer by hand to prove that the computer must be wrong. One day he comes to my dad and says "can you show me how to use one of these computers?"
- 5mo ago

rvz 5mo ago

This is AGI.

keyle 5mo ago
Care to explain?
- rvz 5mo ago
  It depends on who you talk to: For AI researchers, it is an understanding of what "intelligence" is and the emergence of an autonomous system that surpasses all human capabilities that learns over time. For most AI labs like OpenAI and their investors, it used to mean an intelligent system that surpasses all human capabilities at economically useful work, then it meant $100B dollars of profits, now it is an IPO. For Big Tech, it is digital employees and AI data-centers to "streamline" operations. To everyone else, it is mass job displacement and unemployment. For GenZ, it is "permanent underclass". So it depends on who you are talking to and varies. Therefore "AGI" at this point is meaningless.

keyle 5mo ago

[dead]

bsenftner 5mo ago

This Gen Z resentment is manufactured, so there is yet another pool of people that are angry enough to deludedly back the next aggressive idiot "savior", justifying an attack on the general population, ensuring authoritarianism is viewed to be the "only way forward."

tavavex 5mo ago
Yes, because the current pro-AI leaders, CEOs, politicians etc. are anything but authoritarian, right? Think of the rights of the freedom-loving billionaires and their world-scale network of power! What you should really worry about is this imaginary authoritarian anti-AI figure I just came up with.

aaron695 5mo ago

[dead]

solenoid0937 5mo ago

Incredibly sad how many people have no concept of collective achievement, or an understanding of what technological progress buys all of humanity. It always comes at a cost, and it's the reason we aren't dying of starvation and plague in a cold winter field at the age of 45. I guess cynicism is trendy.

microtonal 5mo ago
Technology is not value-less. There is technology with good effects on society and technology with bad effects on society. I think very few people who are against, say, surveillance capitalism are against antibiotics. It is a completely coherent position to like most technological progress, but at the same time be critical of some uses of ML/AI. You are just making straw men here by suggesting that people that are critical of AI are critical of all technology.
- solenoid0937 5mo ago
  AI is fundamentally automation of labor, and to be opposed to AI instead of preparing our systems for a post-labor world is dangerously misguided - especially with historical context on what automation of labor has done for humanity.
  - microtonal 5mo ago
    AI is fundamentally automation of labor, Well, yes, but if humans need to stay in the loop (as most previous automations of labor), it is also moving the means of production into the hands of a small number of tech companies. In 2010 or 2020, anyone with a laptop could create a startup. It might be the case that in 2030, you could only do so if the major frontier model providers allow you to do so and do not make it so expensive that it's only usable by entrenched players. I am not fundamentally against AI, on the contrary, but I think the models should be in the hands of the wider population (i.e. open weight models), so that everyone has the means of production and can benefit from the automation. Also, it would only be fair, since the models are trained on the collective output of humanity. Of course, there are several barriers currently. There are pretty good open models, but running the near-frontier versions requires a lot of capital in the form of GPUs.

kshahkshah 5mo ago

The actual study doesn’t compare between generations. So I’ve know way of knowing if GenZs attitudes are much different comparatively. Interesting results regardless when they compare the shift of 2025 to 2026

amanaplanacanal 5mo ago

I just wish we would stop calling LLMs AI.

tyleo 5mo ago
To what end?
- madaxe_again 5mo ago
  I think he means the generalisation of the subcategory to the category.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  It confuses people. The same way calling what Tesla does full self driving. What people envision as "full self driving" or "artificial intelligence", and what they actually get are not the same thing. When I hear artificial intelligence, I picture Data from Star Trek, not a hopped up Eliza.
anal_reactor 5mo ago
I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, GNU/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, GNU plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning GNU system made useful by the GNU corelibs, shell utilities and vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by POSIX. Many computer users run a modified version of the GNU system every day, without realizing it. Through a peculiar turn of events, the version of GNU which is widely used today is often called Linux, and many of its users are not aware that it is basically the GNU system, developed by the GNU Project. There really is a Linux, and these people are using it, but it is just a part of the system they use. Linux is the kernel: the program in the system that allocates the machine's resources to the other programs that you run. The kernel is an essential part of an operating system, but useless by itself; it can only function in the context of a complete operating system. Linux is normally used in combination with the GNU operating system: the whole system is basically GNU with Linux added, or GNU/Linux. All the so-called Linux distributions are really distributions of GNU/Linux!

DarenWatson 5mo ago

The way we phrase anger with AI doesn't convey the structural realities of what's going on in the knowledge work chain. Gen Z aren't suddenly becoming anti-tech they are acting financially rationally to protect their own economic future. In the past there was an implicit contract for white-collar employment that was based on the concept of earned experience through a period of manufacturing type work. You enter your profession by performing uninteresting, low-paying manufacturing tasks (such as, writing boilerplate type code or performing low-level quality assurance) while you gain domain expertise and gain the perspective necessary to perform high-value work at a higher level. LLMs are now exceptionally good at consuming the 20% of an employees entry-level responsibilities. What I see happening in the enterprise is that management is using AI to justify pulling the ladder up behind them and closing the door behind them. When a senior engineer's or senior analyst's productivity has increased by 30% due to using LLMs, the executive's response is typically not great, we have more time to work on bigger projects, but instead great, we can freeze junior hiring for 2 years. The entry-level positions in the labor force are being automated, causing seriously low access to those roles for the Gen Z workforce. On the other hand, most senior-level positions are not being available to Gen Z workers as they lack the skills and experience required to qualify for those positions. Stagnation in the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technology is the direct result of having no entry or junior level employees to work underneath senior staff members, causing a bottleneck for seniors. Employees generating raw output with AI technology have to check the results (output) for accuracy before integrating into work systems and processes as there are no entry-level employees to provide assistance to senior workers. Gen Z workers do not dislike the tool (AI) however, they do not like how the tool is being implemented and used currently. Currently, the implementation of AI is driven by cost cutting in terms of labor rather than being focused on providing training and developing Gen Z's human capital for future use.

jerrythegerbil 5mo ago
Pretty sure the article explicitly stated the resentment is due to their clearly stated concerns continually being explained away. Was your intention to be an example for resentment? Or are you an AI model demonstrating the embodiment of deserving of the resentment? A voice is being demanded. Being louder and longer is exhausting to endure. Stop rewording and reworking the reasons into something with shape and direction, that only serves to strip the voice demanding being heard. It was written as it was meant. Slop is worse than a carbon copy, of a copy, of a copy.

kypro 5mo ago

I worry and feel so much for people younger than me. As someone who entered the workforce during the GFC things were hard, but I always felt like you could make smart decisions, make decent money and build a decent life. Additionally there were plenty of interesting jobs out there around this time that required real skill and effort which you could become an expert in. Software was really hard pre-2010. You actually had to study it because there was no AI, no stackoverflow, no NPM, etc, etc. You had to learn how to write code the hard way, typically from people who already knew how or text books, and more importantly, learn how to solve real problems often applying maths (i.e. you couldn't import a library to find the shortest path in a graph). Similarly video editing, graphic design, 3d modelling, music production, were some other fields which were really hard. Again, there was no YouTube tutorials or AI and even the software itself was so limited compared to what we have today. You had to spend years learning the craft which meant the skill difference between those who had put years into their thing and those who had not was enormous. I miss that world so much... I liked not being good at things and finding people who had what seemed like inhuman talent at things. I had a friend who was insanely good at graphic design and the stuff they'd send me would blow me away. The level of detail and precision didn't even seem possible to me. But now I can generate something almost just as good with AI. Other examples would be how people who spent years practising music are now indistinguishable from someone with AI. Or how people who spent years learning blender are producing models which are indistinguishable from someone with a Meshy subscription. There's just no reason to dedicate yourself to anything anymore and even if you did you're probably not going to get a job anyway. I am a hardcore AI doomer, but assuming the doom scenario isn't on the table and we simply see a concentration in wealth and mass white-collar job losses, I know I'd probably be fine or maybe even benefit from that because I grew up in a time where it was hard but very much possible to acquire a talent and use it to build wealth. Gen Z on the other hand stand no chance. Today's job market feels corrupt and product of pure luck. You either get extremely lucky and somehow land a good job, or know someone who can get you through the door. In the last year I've interview some insanely talented people from the best universities and we have decided not to employ them because we just don't need to. It's honestly hard for me to comprehend being that motivated and working that hard to struggle to even find an entry level job at the relatively mediocre company I work for... We need to question if more productivity is always good. It seems to me the way that productivity is distributed is essential. If it's largely just corporations benefitting from the productivity gains then we're creating a world that's not suitable for humans. This will create a world in which productivity, and therefore wealth, will concentrate to fewer and fewer people, whilst the average person struggles to find ways to demonstrate their employability. If AI is creating a world that is much richer by some metrics, but much poorer by most the average person cares about, then is it even a technology worth having? Why would Gen Z consent to this world we're building and not seek to overthrow (rightly imo) those who have created it? Technology is suppose to make our lives better not make them harder and financially suppress us.

alecco 5mo ago

AI (even if pseudo-AI) is already a huge productivity multiplier and becoming better... but due to demand also becoming more expensive. And if things keep going this way, only corporations with deep pockets and the top 1% will be able to afford it upfront. I wish Gen Z channeled their anger into making distributed AI instead of turning their backs on the problem or doing protests that will get nowhere since Boomers are still the biggest voting block. small + local + distributed Where is the Gen Z hacker movement? The very few into AI are all sellouts wishing they could join a big lab.

metalman 5mo ago

make no mistake, this is not "resentment" this is a collapse of faith, which having recently experienced myself, is what happens when the expectation is that the frog should do the right thing™, and climb out, stoke the fire (just a little bit), and climb back in the pot

euroderf 5mo ago

Eventually it will dawn on most people that it is time once again to shorten the standard work week. Until then it's all talking in circles.

Timon3 5mo ago
Unfortunately it seems like the winds are blowing in the opposite direction - the German government for example is trying to move us to a 48-hour-week instead.
surgical_fire 5mo ago
I would love that. But that is not going to happen. We would need tangible, meaningful productivity improvements for it to be possible. LLMs are sort of moderately useful, but companies adopting it see no real productivity increase (they see cost increase however). In many ways it is a bullshit technology, being marketed way beyond its capabilities.
- sillyfluke 5mo ago
  >But that is not going to happen. I don't think the 8-hour work day was accepted during the industrial revolution because job providers were convinced of productivity gains. It was won due to the leverage the labor unions and workers had over job providers. The whole thing rests on whether workers can maintain their leverage in the AI era. That leverage is being eroded by the attempt by job providers to decouple humans from production and productivity (whether they will be succesful in this iteration is, as you say, debatable). The other axis is the attempt to erode democratic norms in order to prevent the majority from checking the power of a wealthy minority. Once those two points of leverage are completely eroded, the only leverage left is mob power. And as history has shown on multiple occasions, excercising that leverage is ugly and messy.
  - deleted 5mo ago
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  - surgical_fire 5mo ago

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

Month old post OP; Discussion then: Study found that young adults have grown less hopeful and more angry about AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443 and related: The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47963163 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47963163

deferredgrant 5mo ago

[flagged]

silexia 5mo ago

There certainly is a problem of p companies laying people off and not making new hires, but there is a bigger problem in that this is the most dangerous technology in human history and could lead to our extinction in the next year or two.