[romaniv]

GenAI is the first technology that I've ever seen that is actively rejected by young adults and fervently pushed by people over 55.

It seems Eric Schmids of the world think they (in their 70s) have more say about the future of these students than the students themselves. That is very unlikely.

[mxuribe]

I think it might be because some folks from the older generation have a sense of entitlement...mostly because they often lived through a glorious period that en masse has been beneficial to them...They expected flying cars, etc...So, now, this time they'll get their AI servants...So, its sort of an expectation (for some from this older generation) that the world will keep giving them lots of good (well, good for them!) things in life.

My sincere apologies if my comments are offensive to anyone (of any age group)...but i do agree that I'm seeing way more older people in support of the AI evolution, and many many more younger people fearing it. My age is far closer to the older generation, but lots of times, i'm feeling what i see lots of younger folks feeling: fear.

[ElevenLathe]

I think it's much less about generation than about material conditions. It's easier to convince someone that AI is going to be good for their bottom line if they are already retired, or at least have a significant chunk of savings (and therefore investments) and a job higher up the food chain/org chart than a new college grad does. For most working class people, age is a necessary but not sufficient condition to have these things, but there are plenty of older workers who are feeling the fear as well.

[mxuribe]

Yeah, i agree that there might be older folks also fearing AI - i'm one of them! :-)

As to your point about likely being more due to material conditions rather than age, perhaps you're right....but, then again, on average I'd say the older generation tends to have better material conditions/positions, tends to have at least some savings (maybe retirement, or at least will have more solvent social security, etc.?)...than say young folks who started graduating college from around the great recession to about now? So, maybe we're both right???

[ElevenLathe]

Yeah, I didn't mean to be argumentative, but I hate that issues like this are frequently framed as generational conflicts when they're really class conflicts. There are a lot of people that benefit from erasing the whole concept of class conflict from the public consciousness (though there are many many more that would benefit from the opposite!).

[mxuribe]

You did not come off as argumentative at all; no worries! Apologies if my reply was defensive! :-)

Your point about folks perhaps framing it as generational as opposed to class is quite interesting. I wonder if maybe in the past both of these dimensions (generation and class) overlapped alot more...and now, maybe things skew more towards one generation being more of one class, and so maybe data either getsd hidden, or in many cases the folks in one generation happen to be members of a specific class level? I ask this as a rhetorical question, and not a statement, because i have no idea on a wide scale. For example, if maybe a few generations ago, there were class conflicts across the different generational categories...but nowadays, most (but not all) older folks might identify more with only one side of the class aspect? Anyway, all questions that can't be answered without tons of data and evidence gathering! Good discussion!!!

[gruez]

>and fervently pushed by people over 55.

Source? I think you're conflating "pushed by CEOs" (which might lean on the older side) with "pushed by people over 55".

[romaniv]

The article we're commenting on lists several examples of the dynamic and it aligns with my personal experience offline and online. There are also stats like these:

https://on.substack.com/p/the-substack-ai-report

"Publishers 45 and over were more likely to use AI than those under 45."

I can, of course, dig up more supporting data, but that is not as important to me as making sense of what I'm actually seeing.

https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/views-of-ais-...

"Younger Americans are generally more likely than older Americans to think the increased use of AI will worsen human abilities."

[gruez]

>"Publishers 45 and over were more likely to use AI than those under 45."

There's probably some skew here where old people in general aren't typically on substack, and therefore of the old people who are on substack, they're more "on the cutting edge" than younger publishers, which don't have such skew.

>"Younger Americans are generally more likely than older Americans to think the increased use of AI will worsen human abilities."

Right but what about actual usage? Young believe social media is bad for them, but nonetheless use it.

[aiisjustanif]

> Right but what about actual usage? Young believe social media is bad for them, but nonetheless use it.

The topic was about sentiment, not usage. And the Pew Article has broad sample sizes ranging from 5,000 to 28,000.

[lenerdenator]

CEOs are hired by boards. Boards are hired by shareholders. Most publicly-traded American companies have their shares held by pension and retirement funds. Pension and retirement funds exist to send money to people over 55.

[whatshisface]

I'm sure VPs are sweating bullets over the instructions they will receive during the part of the shareholder's call where mutual fund managers dial their members and hold the phones up to each other.

[lenerdenator]

I know you're trying to reduce it to absurdity, but there's still pressure to make their members happy. The fund managers are under the same competitive pressure as anyone else and are incentivized to get the best possible returns for their clients. If they don't, the members leave and take their money to another fund that is better at making money.

[gruez]

By that definition anything that happens in politics or corporate america is "fervently pushed by people over 55", because that's the group with the most political and economic power. AI push? Boomers. Datacenter backlash? Boomers. ESG push? Boomers. ESG backlash? Boomers.

[lenerdenator]

I know that there's backlash and push on each issue from every age range, but people ultimately vote with their wallets. They're sending their money to people who get them the most money regardless of what they think on an issue.

[mikestew]

Yes, as an oldster I’m constantly on the phone with mutual fund managers expressing my desire for CEOs to push more AI. :eyeroll:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to conspiring with my fellow seniors to keep house prices up in my local area.

[lenerdenator]

I know you're trying to reduce it to absurdity, but that's not what I'm saying you're doing, and I think you know it.

I'm saying people chase returns. If you find out that one mutual fund is going to give you reasonably higher returns than your current mutual fund, you're likely to at least consider the option of switching to that competing mutual fund, regardless of how they get the increased returns.

Multiply that times a few dozen million people and you start to see some effects on the economy, like laying off workers in favor of using AI.

[mikestew]

I'm saying people chase returns.

And I’m saying that there’s so many dots to connect to reach your conclusion that it becomes no conclusion at all, let alone having much to do with the decision-making of oldsters.

[lenerdenator]

It's almost as if this is a complex system of human behavior and incentives that spans an entire society. That being said, if you pay attention to what's going on, it's fairly obvious to see.

Gens Y and Z make up the largest population cohort in the US by size, but hold only 10.5% of total wealth in the US. Baby Boomers hold about half. [0]

Baby Boomers are of retirement age. That means that many of them are drawing off of retirement accounts. Since you can't save for retirement without compensating for inflation, you have to find ways to grow the money. Most people do this through investments backed by stocks and bonds.

Stocks and bonds derive their value from the labor of the people working at the organizations that issued the stocks and bonds. More and more, those people aren't Baby Boomers. They're retired.

So that money is coming from people who are still working: Gens X, Y, and Z.

To increase returns on those stocks and bonds, you have to reduce the amount of money going to the people doing the work so that they can go to shareholders. Those shareholders are often people with retirement accounts.

[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/americas-wealth-distriution...

[jordanb]

I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.

Every time there is push back from younger posters followed by a bit of a generational faceoff.

I think boomers are still inclined to see technology as exciting space-race stuff. As a millennial I remember when the Internet was good but that also feels like a distant memory.

For younger people technology has been dark patterns and skinner boxes and increasingly imposed on them against their will from COVID tela-learning to AI mandates.

[gruez]

>I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.

No, old people just don't bother hiding it, even though they use it less.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-...

[card_zero]

That's a chart for "ever used", not "amount of use".

[furyofantares]

Folks of retirement age or nearing it are largely free to either play with it or not depending on their interest. This segment may present as largely positive if those without interest get to just opt out.

For folks in the middle of their career or earlier, or just starting out, it's more of a labor vs capital thing where capital doesn't care if skills that have been invested in are devalued, and raises expectations where skills are amplified. This segment will likely present as largely negative.

Younger still, high school and earlier, probably fairly free again to play with it or not depending on interest, but subject to temptation to use it to cheat, and subject to teacher influence not to.

[JohnFen]

> fervently pushed by people over 55.

It is?

I know very few people in that age group who are excited by this stuff.

[Ferret7446]

It's really quite simple. AI is threatening to take their jobs. Everyone gets defensive when their livelihood is on the line.

Most technologies offer new opportunities to young adults.

[colechristensen]

Oh don't you know? The young people don't know how to use technology any more. They've never had computers they control. The new hires and the nearly retired have the same computer skils.

Locked down OS iPad kids don't know how to use computers because the manufactures and their parents wouldn't let them.

The Matrix' 1999 "peak of human civilization" wasn't wrong, the world is moving to a society built by a small number of wizards owned by billionaires.

[empath75]

This is pretty wrong. There are a lot of people who _hate it_, but it is still a minority. And older people dislike it more than younger people.

https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/2/27/public-opinio...

Feelings on it are quite mixed, but people who hate it and boosters are both incredibly loud about it.

[intended]

> AI optimism is rising, but so is anxiety.

> Globally, the share of respondents who say AI products and services offer more benefits than drawbacks rose from 55% in 2024 to 59% in 2025, even as the share saying these products make them nervous increased to 52%.

[arjie]

Schmidt's speech to students goes:

> The future does not simply arrive. It gets built in laboratories, in dormitories, in startups, in classrooms, in legislators, and the people building it will be you and people like you.

This prompts you to say:

> It seems Eric Schmids of the world think they (in their 70s) have more say about the future of these students than the students themselves. That is very unlikely.

This doesn't seem like an accurate read on what the Eric Schmidts of the world think.

[romaniv]

Here is a quote that is far more representative of his overall message:

“When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.”

[intended]

It’s also the one tech that has been picked up by porn but not video games.

I’m kinda surprised by that. Gaming and porn were the ones that spearheaded tech uptake.

[lenerdenator]

Follow the money.

People over 55 are most concerned about one thing: retirement. Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for. In the US, you do this by holding assets that yield returns on your investment. Over the last half-century, we've made returning that yield the main objective of publicly-traded corporations to the complete exclusion of everything else.

People like Schmidt were hired by boards, who were elected by shareholders, with the hope that they'd increase returns. The biggest shareholders in most American companies are pension and retirement funds, followed by funds that are not necessarily retirement funds but are often used by individuals to back IRAs and 401(k)s.

When the executives of Schmidt's generation were hired, they were incentivized with stock options instead of cash. Their compensation was directly tied to how much money was returned to shareholders.

When you maximize a return to a shareholder, you do that by minimizing the costs of the inputs to the business. One of those costs is labor. Payroll, benefits, the costs of the office space people work in, etc.

GenAI offers shareholders - which can be seen as synonymous with people who are approaching retirement or who are retirees - a promise of massively reducing labor costs. In the minds of a lot of institutional investors, they could have companies where the same amount of value is created with only c-suite and executive-level employees working with teams of AI agents that, over time, will become cheaper and cheaper. What was once hundreds or thousands of employees is now a few dozen.

Now, where does this leave young and middle-aged people? In a place where they have a wildly uncertain future. But that's not the retiree's problem. They want the villa on the golf course in Florida, and by the time you have real social problems resulting from a population with no hope for the future, the retirees will be dead or too old to care.

Schmidt's cohort, for their part, have enough money to deal with those problems in the near to mid-term. Or, at least, they think they do.

EDIT:

Love getting downvoted for what is, essentially, a factual statement.

[QuercusMax]

Since when does retirement mean living off money you didn't labor for? The whole point is the opposite - you can only retire if you have enough resources/income (pension, 401K, gold bars, etc) that you can support yourself without working.

In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.

[lenerdenator]

> Since when does retirement mean living off money you didn't labor for? The whole point is the opposite - you can only retire if you have enough resources/income (pension, 401K, gold bars, etc) that you can support yourself without working.

Since inflation was a thing, so since ever.

If you take the money you labored for and put it in an account without accruing any sort of interest, you will have exactly what you earned to live off of without working.

Since that happens over a span of decades - let's say forty years - that needs to account for the reduction in value brought about by inflation. You offset that using interest generated by loans issued by the institution that operates the account (which is not you laboring) or by returns from owning equities (which is the output of other people's labor).

I suppose the gold bars you mention could rise in value enough to offset inflation without resorting to taking a slice of someone else's economic output, but that's not how most retirement accounts are backed.

> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.

We also have the problem that a lot of people at the beginning and middle of their lives don't have the standard of living that their parents had despite doing all of the "right" things.

[infamouscow]

> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.

Gen Z and majority of millennials are completely unsympathetic to this problem.

From their perspective, older generations have actively hindered their careers and financial opportunities to the point where they know they'll have to work their entire lives. They also know the US is marching towards financial calamity when Medicare becomes insolvent in the early 2030s, and don't anticipate Medicare or Social Security to exist when they're older.

[pesus]

Elaborating on this viewpoint: those seniors also had their chance to save for retirement in the cushiest and most prosperous economy of all time. If they didn't choose to do that because they wanted to party or "find themselves", that's on them, and they still got to live it up for cheap while simultaneously removing the ability of future generations to do the same. No millennial or gen Z is going to care that they didn't bother to save a few bucks in a time when houses and college cost as much as a McChicken.

Obviously there are exceptions, but that's the general perception.

[mikestew]

Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for.

“Factual statement“, that’s hilarious. Nothing wrong with an op-ed, but with an opening like that you might want to step back and re-examine those “facts”.

[jedberg]

OP wrote it poorly, but isn't wrong. Most retires get income from a few places: Social Security, 401K, or rental property.

Social security is a direct transfer of money from people currently working to people no longer working. The amount you get is vaguely based on how much you earned when you worked, but it's not like the money you paid in went into a savings account for you. It went to the people who were already retired. Remember, the first recipients of SS never paid in anything. It's been a long chain of working paying non-working ever since.

401k's are usually based on stocks. The value of stocks is based on the labor of the people who work at the company. The dividends and interest come from that labor too. Once again, at one point you were that labor, but your labor was going to retired people, and now it's "your turn".

And rental income comes from people giving you the money they get from their labor. You used your labor to buy the house, but the current money comes from their labor.

Now the rest of what they are saying is flawed because two of those three would go away if AI replaced all labor. But they are correct in saying that your cashflow in retirement comes from other people's labor, just as your labor went to other people when you were working.

[lenerdenator]

It's exactly factual.

Let's say you take 10% of each paycheck, withdraw it as cash, and put it in a safe in my basement from my first paycheck to my last one 40 years later. The safe is a safe. It earns no interest. No one else contributes to the monetary value of the contents of the safe in any way.

The 40 years are up. You need to pay for groceries. You go down to my basement and behold the fruits of four decades of toil. You take some of it to the grocery store... and it takes up a far, far larger percentage of your cash pile than you thought it would.

Inflation got you. In fact, if we're talking about 40 years ending this last April, it shaved 66.6% off of the purchasing power of the money in that safe.

Uh oh.

So how do you deal with inflation? Instead of putting your money in a safe, you put it in a retirement account. That retirement account creates wealth for you by investing your money into equities, bonds, and other assets.

Equities and bonds typically grow in value by backing the asset with the surplus value generated by the labor of the people who are doing work for the entity that issued the equity or the bond.

Could you also invest in assets that don't get their returns off of other people's labor? Of course, but most retirement accounts in the US today do not do this.

So, yes, you're living off of money that you did not labor for, at least after you exhaust the inflation-adjusted value of the principal you put up for your retirement savings.

[triceratops]

> Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for

So like you just get handed money to retire without ever working a day in your life? Please tell how this works I want some of that.

[lenerdenator]

You do once you exhaust the value of the retirement account that matches the principal that you invested into it.

[triceratops]

If money from investments made with earned money isn't also earned money then no money is earned money.

[lenerdenator]

Of course it's earned money, it's just that someone else earned it.

Increasingly those someones are people who have a lower standard of living than their parents' generation did.

That tends to rot those someones' faith in the future, which is a good way to bring about undesirable changes in a society.

[jedberg]

Your argument is a bit flawed though. Most retires get income from a few places: Social Security, 401K, or rental property.

401k's will do great with AI replacing all labor. But social security will disappear and so will rental income, because no one will be able to afford housing anymore.

[lenerdenator]

Most 401(k)s are backed by stocks and bonds. At least in the short term, yes, they'll do great as labor costs shrink in relation to the money earned by selling goods and services. However, if you have fewer and fewer people able to consume because they no longer have income, well, then you have the same problem as you do with housing and social security.

People say that universal basic income is a fix, but let's be honest: employers don't pay people more than they absolutely have to right now, and that's with most of the value earned for the employers being provided by people doing actual work for them. What makes anyone think they'll gladly cough up for those who don't work for them, especially at an amount that will allow most people's standard of living to either remain steady or improve?

[ryandrake]

My own conspiracy theory is that AI, and the increasingly authoritarian government swings, are the Boomer generation's last shot at freezing the world in time and ensuring our world is shaped to their vision long after they're all gone. The thing that generation fears the most is that we're all going to just move on from them when they're dead, and finally progress past this "1970-2020" economic/cultural stasis that we've been stuck in for basically my entire life.

[amoss]

kind of wild that you think there has been no shift in culture between 1970 and 2020

[Larrikin]

A lot of the cultural changes that were achieved are actively being fought against and are slowly being reversed. Seems like every few weeks there is something from the civil rights era being chipped away at.

[runarberg]

I grew up in the 90s in Europe. Back then Europe had strong consumer protection, pretty strong worker protection, low entry jobs still payed a bunch, cheap housing (my single parent mom was able to buy a flat while working at a gas station at the age of 23).

Today’s Europe is nothing but austerity, there is no consumer protection left, they’ve split the society by having “jobs that only immigrants want” (i.e. insultingly low paying jobs), nobody can buy a flat anymore unless they’re a 10 year senior at a tech company.

Today’s Europe is exactly the kind of world I always imagine the 1970s to be like. The only exception is in the 1970s Europe had a strong communist or socialist opposition which actively fought for a better world with strikes every week (or at least that is how I read European history).

[mxuribe]

I think you stated better what i was trying to babble in another comment here. :-)

And you might think it is a conspiracy theory...but the sentiment i'm seeing (obviously a limited data set to only folks i engage with) seems to align so much to it...that if not fully true, *feels* quite close to it - even if not an intentional thing.

[barebearcountry]

+1

[dyauspitr]

This is not even close to the reality on the ground. But America’s enemies would be smacking their lips and rubbing their hands together imagining a regressive youth.