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:
>"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>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://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."