Recent college grads are not very fond of commencement speakers hyping up a technology they see as a threat to their career prospects
A 2025 Harvard poll of young people in the US found that a majority see AI as a threat to their career prospects. Pagel and his peers are entering a job market where AI’s efficiency is already being used to justify mass layoffs. While it’s unclear which jobs may be entirely replaced by AI – and whether AI could eventually create more career pathways than it destroys – recent graduates are feeling betrayed.
“We’ve been pushed our entire lives to get our diplomas. Then you pulled the rug out from underneath us, and said: ‘Oh, you know those four years you spent learning how to do very specific things, you don’t need to do it any more,’” Pagel says. “We can get a computer to do it for two-thirds the price.”
What to me is most baffling. Has there been a point in history where the new tech is loved by the old generation and hated by the new one?
I mean unless I was just totally in a box. College students were pretty darn hyped at the coming of celphones, internet.
AI though really just hits the opposite. It’s like all the old guys are like “yeah this is it, this is the future”, and everyone under 50 is instantly aware that most of what it wants to do, is terrifying, and the overall outcomes are all bad. It feels like a modern manhattin project.
It’s not young vs old, it’s capital-owning class vs everyone else. AI is trying to solve a trillion dollar problem: paying wages. If you live off wages you hate ai because it endangers your livelihood. If you live off your capital you love ai because you get more of the pie.
While willfully ignoring the upcoming rug pull once AI becomes too entrenched to decouple and the providers jack up the price a hundredfold. Hell, some of them have already begun the process and CEOs still haven’t noticed the noose they’re tying around their own necks.
It’s already happening. AI is already more expensive than humans.
One case where enshittification is a good thing.
Yeah this seems right. It’s not comparable to who was excited about computers or even automobiles. It’s comparable to who was excited about offshoring, colonisation, or slavery.
So class war as usual.
This is a lesson I learned during COVID.
People’s stances are highly correlated with what makes them money.
That tells me that we will never have an honest society until you don’t have to constantly worry about making a living,
I mean doesnt even seem fully that. It looks more like the political leanings in right vs left. IE going with my local area… it’s quite a lot of broke as hell people singing the praises and trying to say “no they said the new data center will generate it’s own power, our prices won’t change at all when they add the data center”, and “see look it will only use half the water as the large car manufacturing plant we already have that employs half this city”.
I don’t think this is true. I think it’s more like people who run companies and are excited about how much money AI will save them in salary pay are gung ho about it. Everyone else is rightly concerned.
I mean looking at it, famous woman who recently got boo’d at a college graduation was a real estate executive, Eric Schmidt I can give that falling into the category, Richard dawkins also recently started on the AI praising train as well and to my knowledge he doesn’t have any benefit from firing a ton of people etc… and looking at my areas next doors as the discussion of data centers opening up in our area. It really seems to be the boomers calling Millenials and Gen Z Luddites.
Personally I think it’s due to the fact that for a lot of older people the progress of technology has been a massive boon to them regardless of how imlong it took for them to adopt it. Boomers and elder Gen X got to experience the technological boom of the post war period with minimal issues from said tech. Younger Gen X and elder Millennials saw some of it but also generally experienced the a lot of the early downsides of it all it. Younger Millennials and elder Gen Z saw it all be automated and rat fucked to the point of uselessness in a lot of cases for example finding a job. And I’m pretty sure younger Gen Z and elder Gen Alpha are gonna burn society to the ground, rightly so.
So the 1950s and the so called nuclear age was driven by older generation in corporation, utilities, and politicians who thought it was the next great age. The next generations were the anti-nuclear movements.
Globalization too in the 90s and 2000s, was corporations of older generation and the next generations thought it was threating and full of shite.
Still, I think your point stands as this also involves creative professionals as well as white collar workers which those didn’t.