Life is an Information Superhighway

In the vintage Life commercial, two kids are hesitant to try a cereal that’s supposed to be good for you. So they decide to push it off to a younger kid. “Let’s get Mikey. He won’t eat it. He hates everything.” Well, as you probably recall, he likes it. Hey Mikey! This classic tale of the younger generation leading the older ones into a new world of products seems to be playing out in reverse when it comes to AI. The younger folks, who use the technology the most, are the ones who tend to have the most negative feelings about it. As Nilay Patel explains in The Verge: “The polling on this is so strong, I think it’s fair to say that a lot of people hate AI, and that Gen Z in particular seems to hate AI more and more as they encounter it. There’s that NBC News poll showing AI with worse favorability than ICE and only a little bit above the war in Iran.” The People Do Not Yearn for Automation. “Poll after poll shows that Gen Z uses AI the most and has the most negative feelings about it. A recent Gallup poll found that only 18 percent of Gen Z was hopeful about AI, down from an already-bad 27 percent last year. At the same time, anger is growing: 31 percent of those Gen Z respondents said they feel angry about AI, up from 22 percent last year … This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.” Young people could be the most angry at AI because they’re worried about its potential impact on their job market. It could also be because the future of AI depends in large part on the people who run AI companies (and the always online younger generation is quite aware of what, in technical terms, you could call the evil douche factor) and government regulation (and the only thing this generation believes in less than good tech leadership is good government leadership). In places where there is more trust in the government to regulate the tech, the vibes are different. Rest of World: AI optimism surges in Asia, unlike in the US. Whatever the reason, it’s notable that the Americans who use and know AI the most also hate it the most. As a side note, even though he is alive and well, John Gilchrist, the kid who played little Mikey in the Life commercial, was rumored to have died from a stomach rupture caused by consuming Pop Rocks and Coke. Sounds like the kind of thing AI might hallucinate.