On AI and Fear

… about the very vocal and passionate push-back against AI from younger folks (primarily college-age adults). The internet is full of clips from commencement speeches right now where the speaker (who’s generally around my age) is talking to graduating seniors about AI and getting booed. The reactions from the speakers run the gamut from utterly bewildered to downright condescending.

I don’t think what we’re seeing is a moral divide or an economic divide. Well, it’s not just that, at least. I think what we’re seeing is a generational divide.

I think there’s a very real chance that one of the reasons that you have people our age telling college-age folks to just “deal with it” in regards to AI (see this clip from my alma mater) is because people our age are in this weird position where we’ve seen this before.

I was born in 1979. By some estimates that makes me GenX, by some Millennial. But there’s a growing acceptance that there was a micro generation (some call us “Xennials” or “The Lost Generation”) in between the two that’s defined by coming of age right when the internet became a real, wide-spread thing. It was such a monumental shift in how the world worked that GenX and Millennials are defined by being on either side of that moment. But people my age? We’re defined by being right in the middle of that moment. And it’s no big deal to us.

We remember life before the internet and we were fine. Better than fine, really. An analog childhood was, in retrospect, a gift. We also remember the internet going mainstream and, yeah, it was wild. But we were fine. Better than fine. We came into our own in the world that the internet built. We were formed by a world changed by the internet. We learned to adapt and thrive in a dramatically changing digital landscape.

AI feels so much like the coming of the internet. It’s a damn mess right now and nobody really understands what to do with it. Generative AI is literally at the blinky-gif Geocities websites stage where it’s all ugly images and bad actors and shouted opinions. That’s what the internet was for most folks through the 90s. They literally didn’t understand the difference between a website and the internet. You can look up videos from back then where people are saying the same stuff about the internet in general that people are saying right now about AI as a general concept.

Not a lot of folks saw what the internet could really become. That underlying web that could connect everything at the speed of light and that whole economies would be built on? Only a few people really saw that coming. To everyone else it was kind of a novelty.

But us Lost Generation folks? We may not have foreseen the internet becoming what it is today. But we we in the thick of it as everything changed. We rode that wave and we’ve fully embraced it. Because of that, Xennials are in the prime position to see this happening again, recognize it, and immediately see where it’s going. On some level, we innately understand how this tech changes the way things connect to each other and to humans. It changes how we interact with the digital world that we watched be born. We can immediately see the potential because we’ve lived this before. It’s not scary to us. It’s huge shift, sure. But, again, we’ve lived through this already. We can do it again.

College age kids have not experienced a shift of this magnitude. They were born into a world with a fully grown-up, established internet. They had tablets and smartphones and streaming TV from the jump. That’s the world they know. This is scary and I think that’s fully understandable. This is a seismic shift in the technology that underpins their understanding of how the world works.

And they don’t have the experience that we had growing up to see where it’s going to go. How could they? It’s stupid to get mad at them for being products of the connected world that we helped build. And it sure as hell doesn’t do any good to be so callously dismissive of their fears as that record exec at MTSU. We should approach this situation as grown-ass adults who legitimately have a lived experience that no other living generation has.

How amazing is it that we’re hitting another huge watershed moment in tech at a time when we’re in our 40s? We’re old enough to be possessed of a tempered and tested maturity and many of us have the experience raising young folks in our tool belts. But we’re young enough to have the energy to engage with the changing world still. And we have a technological flexibility born of coming of age alongside the internet that is unique amongst living generations.

We just have to realize it and stop treating people who are afraid of AI like luddites, cowards, or idiots. “Deal with it” is not an appropriate response. It’s rooted in a truth that we understand inherently (this is never going away but that’s okay because it’s also not going to stay like this) but it’s still not appropriate from a grown-ass man to a younger generation that’s afraid of the change.

We have to make the effort to look up from our lived experiences and realize that nobody else had that experience. And then act with kindness. We can’t just expect them to see the world the way we do because they didn’t grow up in the world we did. We have to put in the work. Explain with compassion. Take the time to put words to what we understand innately. Listen to the fears with open hearts and address them in good faith.

But to a whole generation.

This is huge and it absolutely will not be the same in 5 years. Heck, in 10 years, it will be a tech that underpins everything we do and we won’t even think about it. We’ll get annoyed that we can’t just tell our coffee maker to make us a cuppa the way we like it. It’ll be a stupid annoyance and we’ll know it because we’ll remember when you had to push buttons. But the convenience will be so built into the cadence of everyday life that we won’t think about it until it glitches.

That’s where the internet has left us. We went from flashing marquee text and rotating Welcome gifs on webrings floating in an internet without a usable search engine to a whole ecosystem that lives alongside the physical world and connects everything to everything else. It used to be a whole thing just to get online. It was an activity. An event. Now we’re never not online. It’s an activity and an event to get offline.

AI will be the same. It’s going to underpin all our tech. And it’s going to be so annoying when it doesn’t work right.

And it’s going to be alright.

But right now, it’s scary to folks. Understandably. So it’s the perfect time for the survivors of the last seismic shift to step up with kindness and be the adults in the room.