The long-lived colloquialism, “it went off like a fart on Sunday mass,” may have recently been made obsolete.

“Went off like an AI executive at a commencement speech” may likely become a more relatable experience considering current trends in both church attendance and recent events.

Former Google CEOs and local business and real estate leaders are being met with the same jeers at the mention of a ghost in the machine.

Even the vice president allegedly told grads at the Air Force Academy to withhold their objections.

But perhaps all the screaming is indicative of a greater issue.

The kids are not all right.

The death of the (digital) Wild West

In the late oughts and early tweens, when AI’s greatest feats included besting grandmasters in chess and helping cheat Castlevania speedruns, the consensus was that the winds of progress were blowing in a different direction.

When Myspace changed the world forever by giving everyone the ability to put the most “scenic” moments of their life for the world to see, it was young people who embraced the technology overwhelmingly.

This maiden period of the internet, only shortly after it crawled out of university laboratories, lamented the status quo.

The digital Wild West died when Facebook’s core user base aged dramatically as algorithms increasingly drove engagement and brought larger demographics onto the platform.

From there, there were a few more funny idiosyncrasies that would flourish into full-blown butterfly effects.

Self-driving technology advanced far more slowly than anyone might have thought. The truck driver seemed to have a bit more stopping power in the face of the Nova-Industrial Revolution than a horse did in the prior one.

Meanwhile, chatbots advanced from their primitive state of simple math problems and finishing simple sentences to learning new languages with no human intervention.

Alan Turing famously speculated that true machine intelligence would be indicated by an AI being able to deceive a human that is also a human in 30% of trials.

It may have taken longer than the timeline proposed of fifty years. Yet even rudimentary chatbots now pass Turing’s imitation game with flying colors.

More advanced models can imitate not only human patterns of speech. They can produce art, film and even foment romantic relationships.

Mom always told me, doctor or lawyer…

The AI models might not have been the best drivers right from the bat.

However, they made exceptional accountants, coders, analysts, statisticians, translators, paralegals and almost any other entry-level job that consists mostly of data entry and analysis.

The senior class of 2026 surely sees the world changing. New industrial data centers reshape the very flow of water, the same way erupting smokestacks once christened white moths with spots to hide in ash.

They might feel it changing too.

Recent graduates (aged 22-27) face the highest unemployment rate since COVID, with the current rate resembling that of the early stage of the 2008 Great Recession.

Recent grads report job hunts that resemble hunting a white whale on a vendetta more so than searching for lunch money.

ZipRecruiter reports that 16.4% of graduates reported applying for 20 or more jobs before landing a single offer, versus only 12.4% a year earlier.

Law school applications are also seeing a spike, sending economists signals of concern. This mirrors a phenomenon observed in 2008, in which graduates facing a rocky job market elected to pursue further education at much higher rates than in other years.

Meanwhile, layoffs have been sweeping big tech, and occasionally even insidiously manifesting in Main Street companies, most often citing AI and a rapidly shifting market as the two driving factors.

This overall uncertainty is creating anxiety in today’s young people, perhaps not fully understood in a few generations.

Hoping for a miracle

Pope Leo XIV recently delivered the first encyclical of his papacy. Rather than being a conventional matter of spiritual discourse, it instead took on a tone borrowing the legacy of his namesake.

In the long tradition of accepting a new symbolic papal name, Robert Francis Prevost became Pope Leo XIV to carry the fire of Pope Leo XIII.

Pope Leo XIII reigned during the twilight of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th. In 1891, he delivered an encyclical that forever changed the church. In Rerum Novarum (Of New Things), Leo XIII declared the church a protector of the rights of the worker. He rejected both Marxism and extreme free market capitalism. He assigned the church the role of advocate and voice of the weak, lame and underserved.

This shift in focus, from one of the world’s greatest halls of power, ought to deliver young people some hope, regardless of creed.

The Catholic Church represents one of the most wealthy and powerful organizations on the planet.

It is the world’s largest non-governmental landowner.

It might not be the president or the king of England, but those in power may be starting to feel the shifting of the tide.

It is a generally highly effective stereotype that technology will be embraced by the youth and rejected by older generations.

AI represents a black swan event, in which, while the youth do still have a slightly higher preference compared to their older counterparts, per Pew Research, they are also the most worried about its impact on employment and relationships.

It might be for the best then to listen to the shivers on the back of one’s neck. It is that unnatural vibration on the hairs of the nape — an instinctual response to know that one is at risk of a predator.

Except this predator is in binary.