Traditionally, young people have eagerly embraced hot new technologies — think Sony’s Walkman, Apple’s iPhone, or Napster — and become major drivers of their success in the workplace and society.

And if they spurn a new product — remember Microsoft’s Zune, Google+, or Amazon’s Fire Phone? — it’s often a very bad sign.

That leads us to a new survey from Gallup, GSV Ventures and the Walton Family Foundation that examined Gen Z’s attitudes towards AI, a category the tech industry is currently pushing as if its life depended on it — and found that young people are deeply ambivalent about it, with 48 percent saying that the risks of AI in the workforce outweigh its benefits and a staggering 80 percent saying that using it as a shortcut makes learning more difficult.

Most damning is Zoomers’ trajectory. Excitement about AI dropped 14 percent since last year and hopefulness fell by nine percent, while the proportion of young people feeling “outright anger” toward the tech spiked from 22 percent last year to 31 percent this year.

Add it all up, and it’s a major headwind for the tech industry, because if AI has already left a bad taste in the mouths of the youth, the present and future are going to be far more challenging. One particularly grim glimpse: the 20-year-old Texan man who threw a Molotov cocktail at OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house last week; he reportedly wrote he was concerned about the risk that AI could pose toward humanity, dovetailing with the findings from the Gallup survey.

“Underlying this growing skepticism are concerns about AI’s impact on core cognitive and professional skills,” the survey authors wrote. “Gen Z remains unconvinced that AI enhances creativity, critical thinking or even efficiency. The majority believe AI-driven efficiency may come at a cost, particularly
to learning.”

In another recent survey, 44 percent of Gen Z workers admitted to sabotaging their employers’ AI deployments as a form of rebellion. They hate these AI systems because of fears of job displacement, the systems’ security holes, and that these models paradoxically add more work on their shoulders.

Couple all that with the constant drumbeat of Zoomers who risk becoming part of a permanent underclass in the AI economy, and it’s no wonder young people are in despair.

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