The Kids Are Not Rejecting AI. They're Rejecting the Pitch.

Is the younger generation rejecting AI or the people behind it?

There’s several stories and videos making the rounds about how the younger generation is rejecting AI. You’ve probably seen the headlines: College grads booing commencement speakers, teens choosing flip phones and a general swing towards analog experiences.

And every time one of these stories breaks, a pious technologist clutches his Patagonia vest and frets that AI is being rejected like the denial of God.

But if you bother to speak to anyone who is questioning AI, you will find that they are not rejecting it (and all the other digital garbage piled next to it) but rather what it has come to represent and who’s peddling the stories. My own sons (27, 23, and 10) all have repeatedly expressed their doubts about who’s behind the AI curtain.

Nobody is storming the gates over a LLM. What they’re nauseous about is the greedy people behind these genuinely excellent tools. The tool is not the problem, it’s the bullshit hype behind the tools. Mike Troiano does a really good job of describing this tension in his recent musings: My Son Thinks AI is For Cheaters. He’s Half Right.

Because the tools are pretty amazing. The revolt isn’t against the tools. It’s against the guy who sold you the elixir while swearing it would also save you time, fix your marriage, find God, and ten-x your portfolio by next quarter.

It’s not just the kids who are wary of these proclamations. At our retreats for people in midlife transitions, we’re hearing the exact same doubts. C-level execs, VC’s, founders, and a long list of accomplished technologists are exhausted by the Ferris wheel of hype and disappointment.

We are all tired of being told about the deific, life-altering, civilization-scale benefits of technology. We are profoundly bored of the same false promise wearing a new costume every eighteen months. The internet was going to set us free. Crypto was going to free us. The cloud was going to free us. The metaverse, briefly, between two Tuesdays, was going to free us. Now it’s AI’s turn to free us. Notice that nobody ever feels freer. They just feel sold to, again, by someone with a newer snake oil.

I count myself amongst this wary crew. We are not revolting against the tool. We are revolting against the people, the businesses, and the systems behind the tools. The people who exaggerated its usefulness and lied about its value, then acted wounded when we asked hard questions and quickly pivoted to the next “big thing.”

This isn’t a movement away from technology. It’s a movement toward humanity. People want to be seen. They want to be connected. They want to be valued. What they emphatically do not want is another billionaire, or, God help us all, the world’s first trillionaire, explaining what they need over the hum of his own enrichment and data centers.

Just because someone is getting rich from a thing does not mean the thing is worth pursuing. Those are two completely separate facts that the tech media has spent decades gluing together.

I know this with a confidence that runs deeper than a hunch. I’ve sat in rooms with hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, founders, executives, the whole catalog of people who supposedly won. And they tell me the same thing, almost word for word. They were promised that technology, and the money and status stapled to it, would be some kind of savior. They chased it. They caught it. And then they sat there holding it, waiting for the feeling to arrive, and discovered how hollow the whole thing was.

They’re tired. Not lazy-tired but soul-tired. Disappointed. They want the connection of actual other humans around a fire or around a kitchen table. Not another overinflated, over-marketed, over-hyped false idol with a AI-generated keynote and a waitlist.

We all bear some responsibility for this disconnect. I’ve been that techno-optimist in my previous life. I’ve sold the solution before I knew the real cost or value of. We need to choose something different. My friend, and fellow recovering technologist, Scott Barker, has written eloquently about how we can take an active role in crafting the future we want. In his words, “If we do not rise to the occasion, we will see a deeper fragmentation across society, synthetic meaning starting to replace real meaning and increased dependence on external regulation (AI, drugs, virtual reality).”

So when you read the next breathless headline about the youth turning their backs on the future, read it with a healthy dose of reality. The kids aren’t rejecting the future. They’re rejecting the pitch for it. And if a generation that grew up marinated in this digital stuff is calling it garbage, the smart move isn’t to argue with them.

Rather, take a moment to wonder what they can smell that the media missed. Because for every voice lamenting about the youth’s misunderstood rejection of AI, are 1000’s of voices that are meeting at the local café, or bookclub, or dinner tables. You won’t see them or hear them because they aren’t posting about it or standing on a stage pitching it to a group of Patagonia wearing robots.