I am a young adult and I'm seeing the exact opposite from my perspective - and that opinion is also derived from the labor market. That's not to say my generation doesn't have its fair share of AI boosters, but overall the love for AI seems positively correlated to age IMO. HN users in their 40s-50s usually love AI, and outside of computer science, the biggest consumers of mass-produced AI content on social media are old people.

In the labor sector, older people are already entrenched in their position, they have seniority, power and lots of connections. They know that they won't be hit first, and if they are, they could still use their years of experience to get another job. Even if it's a simpler and less glamorous job, they will at least be able to get one. Worst case, they take their accumulated savings and can put it into pivoting to something else. So, lots of them see AI as a toy on their personal time - it gives them dopamine when they can suddenly make anything they ever wanted but didn't have the energy to put that kind of time in anymore.

The junior hiring market has already been decimated, and most other young people I know aren't keen on falling in love with the technology that's effectively a gun pointed at our face. If companies tightening their belts wasn't enough, AI-assisted cheating in schools and interviews, AI-made resumes and interviews literally conducted by AI ensured that breaking into employment is almost impossible because the juniors literally can't obtain any credibility anymore and the companies just don't want to hire anymore. Additionally, young people are more perceptive of social issues and inequality because they are more disadvantaged in society than older people - and AI is already making inequality more and more extreme.

> It’s hard to separate out the valid critiques from the author’s own rationalization for their dislike of AI disruption.

This seems kind of a strawman to me - when people use rationalizations on this topic, the underlying reasons for disliking AI are usually far more complex than "I don't like change and new things", this kind of framing is only useful to simplify and then dismiss the worries.