> ...while 31% of Gen Z now report feeling outright anger toward the technology...

31% seems remarkably high. Here we seem to be running up against the limitations of statistics. It is hard to interpret whether this is a scared-and-angry sort of angry or if there is something AI-related happening that is making them angry. I might have been lucky in my experiences, but generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing".

I think the fear narrative is a bit of a thought terminating cliche.

Most people who aren't in AI sees plain as day how everything AI touches is turning into the digital equivalent of flimsy IKEA furniture. The main selling point of AI so far is that it makes things cheaper to produce while still looking good at a glance.

"The thing I used to like costs the same or more but is now cheaper quality and worse and they think I'm dumb enough not to notice" really isn't a selling point, but pretty much the universal western post-2008 experience, and nothing quite embodies this transformation like AI.

But yeah, you also have all the AI CEOs chewing the scenery like Jeremy Irons in the DnD movie which really hasn't done the image of AI any favors either.

There are at least some redeeming features of AI, but I think it's become this scapegoat for a lot of things that it touches that are also larger unsolved problems with the economy, and it's even used that way, e.g. to motivate layoffs that would otherwise signal to investors that a company isn't doing as well as they'd like you to think.

Think about the anger toward Clippy. Now think about Clippy, but where feeding Clippy is a significant part of GDP, and there's a religious fervor around Clippy, especially among the older and wealthy.

That's my personal impression of the anger. It's not so much luddite anger, its like Clippy anger and millenial anti-Boomer anger mixed together.

It's like a twist on the Turing test, where some humans can't tell the difference between a human and a computer, but others can, and they tend to be younger on average. The Turing test ironically ends up telling you more about the person taking the test.

> generally if people get angry there is a reason other than "things are changing"

Silicon Valley’s leaders have been one upping themselves on messaging to the public that they’re building a doomsday device. And then, bewilderingly to the outside, all of us who read through that bullshit then appear to merrily go along with the apparent suicide pact.

Most Gen Z, it appears, can also see through the bullshit. But about a third of them taking the message sincerely seems par for the course, and as you said, I wouldn’t assume it’s just aversion to change.

[dead]