The More Young People Use AI, the More They Hate It (opens in new tab)

In tech, young people can complain.

Us, the older folks, are not allowed to complain, lest we get branded as old fashioned, unable to adapt, etc.

> Freystaetter and Gottlieb both say that instead of their own generation, they are more worried about Gen Alpha and other young people that come after them, who lose their chance to develop healthy relationships with technologies when they become mandatory and ubiquitous.

I remember similar concerns from Millennials about Gen-Z with the Internet and social media. In the end the Internet and Social Media Gen-Z grew up with was quite different from the one Gen-Y was worried about and the reaction of the new generation to it of course not uniform. Similar developments might happen with Gen Alpha and AI, which seems even more polarizing to me.

    > They are being told, on the one hand, that these tools are going to eliminate millions of jobs, and on the other that they have to use them if they don’t want to fall behind.

I'm currently reading a fascinating book called Blood In The Machine° about the Luddites who opposed certain technologies in 19th century England and the parallels with the current state of affairs. It's important to remember that while history doesn't repeat itself, it often rhymes.

° https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59801798-blood-in-the-ma...

The cool thing about the current generation of AI tools is how easy it is to uncover bias or an agenda in an article like this.

paste the verge article text into your favorite AI tool and ask for an analysis.

Make sure to ask it to read the source Gallup data that this article leans on and compare the conclusions drawn.

The irony is that AI is best at replacing the work of the upper classes. Synthesizing different opinions, summarizing them, and producing outputs based on statistics are things AI does well.

But AI is actually not very good at replacing an entire lower-level worker’s job as a whole. It works well only when that work is broken down into smaller and smaller tasks.

The core problem is this: the coercive force of AI use is felt by the lower classes, while the upper classes still have the freedom not to use it. AI may be able to make decisions based on more data than executives do, and perhaps even make better decisions than management. Yet the people being replaced are the lower-level workers.

This is the problem. The upper classes, who claim that AI is an essential tool, still have the freedom not to use it. But the lower classes cannot survive unless they use it. It becomes a tool required for survival, while at the same time being treated as something wrong, inferior, or low-status if you use it.

To get a job, AI becomes an essential survival tool. But culturally, it is also treated as a tool that damages creativity. I see this in open-source communities as well, in the class discourse around open source.

The same culture appears on Hacker News. Among the upper layer of open-source communities, there is often hostility toward AI-generated code, based on ideas of human purity: AI code is said to have no meaning, no responsibility, no real authorship. So even within open source, this takes on a class character.

But as a freelance developer, I have to trade against my own code-writing ability in order to survive and deliver. Because of AI, the floor price of software delivery has collapsed. If I do not use AI, I cannot meet the new requirements.

In the past, a job that would have given me two months and paid $5,000 is now expected to be completed in two weeks for the same $5,000. Without AI, that volume of work is impossible to handle.

This kind of discourse always makes me uncomfortable. I dislike it, but I have to use it.

AI lowers the barrier to creation and learning, but the way it lowers that barrier can also bypass the training of thought itself. It turns young people into both beneficiaries and damaged subjects at the same time.

And we live under this loop of coercion. Sometimes I think I do not want to use AI.

But if I want to survive, I have to use it. I feel the abilities I once took pride in beginning to decay, and I feel myself becoming increasingly bound to AI companies. At the same time, I also feel another kind of ability beginning to emerge.

Perhaps growing older means learning how to live inside irony.

My daughter's a senior in college. She recently was part of a group presentation; she did not use AI to prepare for it, but all of the other group members did. She was the only one who could answer follow-on questions.

If you use AI to understand things for you, you're short-changing yourself.

Gen-Z is pretty cool. The problem is a small subset of Gen-X and Millenials who have too much money and power and treat AI as if it is the Dianetics bible from SciFi author Ron L. Hubbard (who according to James Randi knew exactly what he was doing).

There are truly mentally unwell people in charge who would like get out the E-meter and audit everyone who does not follow their new Scientology knockoff. Yes, the advertising methods and suppression of opposition are the same.

Paywalled so I can't read the article.

However, is this exclusive to young people? I'm a millenial (early 90s) and I share their sentiment. I might not share it for the same reason though. Personally, I'm concerned about what AI usage would do to my cognitive ability, and as such I try to limit my use. I can't avoid using it at work (we're being tracked on "AI Adoption") and it does genuinely speed up some of my tasks. And I do play around with AI coding tools, mostly because I think I _should_ know them in this day and age.

But apart from that, I'm not using it. I'm using DDG searches rather than asking ChatGPT for solutions, I still go around reading websites and papers instead of AI summaries, and I don't outsource my writing to it. (i.e, I write my own emails, my own blogs, my own poorly worded HN comments, etc).

We know that AI will ultimately just end up enriching a very small group of people with no change in prosperity for working and middle classes. CEOs are openly saying as much. For the past number of decades the rise in productivity has been completely detached from wages, it'll be no different this time.

We're also no strangers to enshittification, we have first hand experience of technology causing negative societal effects when in the hands of for-profit entities.

Previously on the Gallup study:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47704443

>> AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s?

2 comments that smack of AI authorship, or if the above is human-created, god I wish they'd used AI.

It's the latest form of elitism - like in less sunny countries it's fashionable to be tanned because it means you are rich enough to have time to hang around on the beach while in sunny countries it's fashionable to be light skinned because you are rich enough that you don't have to work in the sun. Disdain for AI is a luxury belief of those who are either talented enough to draw / write / code without or are wealthy enough to not have to.

I don’t understand why people act like we just have to submit to the AI revolution. We can make this technology illegal, and shut it down completely. Why don’t we?

The irony here is this: AI actually has the potential to absolutely level the playing field.

Right now corporations are building the infrastructure out wildly and incorporating it into everything. They’re concerned about a race to the top while creating absolute inefficiency and ignoring responsible, sustainable growth.

The task of GenZ should not be to avoid AI, in my opinion.

Rather, embrace it. Own it.

WEAPONIZE IT.

When Google mainstreamed the Search Engine and added tool after tool, it made things that were previously legacy (Word Processing? Pay a big licensing fee to Microsoft, only save to your local machine or hard media! Along comes Google Drive and Docs and now you can edit your document everywhere and a computer crash doesn’t take it out!) well, digitized.

AI is that integration at warp speed.

We now have the tools to work harder and faster. We have near-instant access to research. If we are discerning, AI is actually not a weapon against us. It is a tool we can use to change the narrative.

Big companies are actually banking on fear of the masses. They want you to believe that AI is too big. That it is all-knowing. They don’t want you to recognize you can download ollama and a localized agent and tune it to your needs. Or to get into Gemini and ask it how you can disconnect from Google’s cloud if that’s really what you want it to do.

AI is the future. But it needs human hands. The question. You need to ask is: your hands? Or Microsoft’s?