>"Publishers 45 and over were more likely to use AI than those under 45."

There's probably some skew here where old people in general aren't typically on substack, and therefore of the old people who are on substack, they're more "on the cutting edge" than younger publishers, which don't have such skew.

>"Younger Americans are generally more likely than older Americans to think the increased use of AI will worsen human abilities."

Right but what about actual usage? Young believe social media is bad for them, but nonetheless use it.

>I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.

No, old people just don't bother hiding it, even though they use it less.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-...

I'm sure VPs are sweating bullets over the instructions they will receive during the part of the shareholder's call where mutual fund managers dial their members and hold the phones up to each other.

By that definition anything that happens in politics or corporate america is "fervently pushed by people over 55", because that's the group with the most political and economic power. AI push? Boomers. Datacenter backlash? Boomers. ESG push? Boomers. ESG backlash? Boomers.

Yes, as an oldster I’m constantly on the phone with mutual fund managers expressing my desire for CEOs to push more AI. :eyeroll:

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to conspiring with my fellow seniors to keep house prices up in my local area.

Most 401(k)s are backed by stocks and bonds. At least in the short term, yes, they'll do great as labor costs shrink in relation to the money earned by selling goods and services. However, if you have fewer and fewer people able to consume because they no longer have income, well, then you have the same problem as you do with housing and social security.

People say that universal basic income is a fix, but let's be honest: employers don't pay people more than they absolutely have to right now, and that's with most of the value earned for the employers being provided by people doing actual work for them. What makes anyone think they'll gladly cough up for those who don't work for them, especially at an amount that will allow most people's standard of living to either remain steady or improve?

You do once you exhaust the value of the retirement account that matches the principal that you invested into it.

OP wrote it poorly, but isn't wrong. Most retires get income from a few places: Social Security, 401K, or rental property.

Social security is a direct transfer of money from people currently working to people no longer working. The amount you get is vaguely based on how much you earned when you worked, but it's not like the money you paid in went into a savings account for you. It went to the people who were already retired. Remember, the first recipients of SS never paid in anything. It's been a long chain of working paying non-working ever since.

401k's are usually based on stocks. The value of stocks is based on the labor of the people who work at the company. The dividends and interest come from that labor too. Once again, at one point you were that labor, but your labor was going to retired people, and now it's "your turn".

And rental income comes from people giving you the money they get from their labor. You used your labor to buy the house, but the current money comes from their labor.

Now the rest of what they are saying is flawed because two of those three would go away if AI replaced all labor. But they are correct in saying that your cashflow in retirement comes from other people's labor, just as your labor went to other people when you were working.

It's exactly factual.

Let's say you take 10% of each paycheck, withdraw it as cash, and put it in a safe in my basement from my first paycheck to my last one 40 years later. The safe is a safe. It earns no interest. No one else contributes to the monetary value of the contents of the safe in any way.

The 40 years are up. You need to pay for groceries. You go down to my basement and behold the fruits of four decades of toil. You take some of it to the grocery store... and it takes up a far, far larger percentage of your cash pile than you thought it would.

Inflation got you. In fact, if we're talking about 40 years ending this last April, it shaved 66.6% off of the purchasing power of the money in that safe.

Uh oh.

So how do you deal with inflation? Instead of putting your money in a safe, you put it in a retirement account. That retirement account creates wealth for you by investing your money into equities, bonds, and other assets.

Equities and bonds typically grow in value by backing the asset with the surplus value generated by the labor of the people who are doing work for the entity that issued the equity or the bond.

Could you also invest in assets that don't get their returns off of other people's labor? Of course, but most retirement accounts in the US today do not do this.

So, yes, you're living off of money that you did not labor for, at least after you exhaust the inflation-adjusted value of the principal you put up for your retirement savings.

> Since when does retirement mean living off money you didn't labor for? The whole point is the opposite - you can only retire if you have enough resources/income (pension, 401K, gold bars, etc) that you can support yourself without working.

Since inflation was a thing, so since ever.

If you take the money you labored for and put it in an account without accruing any sort of interest, you will have exactly what you earned to live off of without working.

Since that happens over a span of decades - let's say forty years - that needs to account for the reduction in value brought about by inflation. You offset that using interest generated by loans issued by the institution that operates the account (which is not you laboring) or by returns from owning equities (which is the output of other people's labor).

I suppose the gold bars you mention could rise in value enough to offset inflation without resorting to taking a slice of someone else's economic output, but that's not how most retirement accounts are backed.

> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.

We also have the problem that a lot of people at the beginning and middle of their lives don't have the standard of living that their parents had despite doing all of the "right" things.

> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.

Gen Z and majority of millennials are completely unsympathetic to this problem.

From their perspective, older generations have actively hindered their careers and financial opportunities to the point where they know they'll have to work their entire lives. They also know the US is marching towards financial calamity when Medicare becomes insolvent in the early 2030s, and don't anticipate Medicare or Social Security to exist when they're older.

A lot of the cultural changes that were achieved are actively being fought against and are slowly being reversed. Seems like every few weeks there is something from the civil rights era being chipped away at.

I grew up in the 90s in Europe. Back then Europe had strong consumer protection, pretty strong worker protection, low entry jobs still payed a bunch, cheap housing (my single parent mom was able to buy a flat while working at a gas station at the age of 23).

Today’s Europe is nothing but austerity, there is no consumer protection left, they’ve split the society by having “jobs that only immigrants want” (i.e. insultingly low paying jobs), nobody can buy a flat anymore unless they’re a 10 year senior at a tech company.

Today’s Europe is exactly the kind of world I always imagine the 1970s to be like. The only exception is in the 1970s Europe had a strong communist or socialist opposition which actively fought for a better world with strikes every week (or at least that is how I read European history).