AI has a generation problem. At commencements across the US this month, 22-year-old graduates booed any mention of artificial intelligence: at the University of Central Florida, at Middle Tennessee State University, and loudly enough to drown out ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona. Advertisers pay disproportionate premiums to reach 18-to-25-year-olds precisely because preferences formed at that age calcify. AI is getting locked out.
The cause is not mysterious. AI lab leaders have spent years publicly predicting mass job losses concentrated in entry-level white-collar roles, the exact roles these graduates are trying to enter, while simultaneously sprinting toward trillion-dollar IPOs projected to land as soon as this year. This week, VC Marc Andreessen told Joe Rogan's audience that AI is superior to workers because it 'never gets sick, never gets depressed because his girlfriend broke up with him, never files HR complaints.' That pitch does not land with a new grad unemployed on their parents' couch.
The piece is worth reading in full not for the conclusion but for the structural argument underneath it: this is not primarily a messaging failure that better PR can fix. The original traces how the gap between AI's financial trajectory and its stated social consequences has become too wide for any spokesperson to bridge, and asks what happens when the technology's most consequential skeptics are the workers it will need to eventually win back.
[READ ORIGINAL →]