The middle distribution of Gen Z’s feelings about AI range from apprehension to downright hatred. Despite the fact that more than half of Gen Z living in the U.S. uses AI regularly, according to a recently released Gallup poll, less than a fifth feel hopeful about the technology. About a third says the technology makes them angry. And nearly half say it makes them afraid.
Gallup’s own senior education researcher, Zach Hrynowski, blamed the bad vibes at least partially on the dwindling job market. The oldest Zoomers, he told Axios, are the angriest, as they are “acutely aware” of the ability of a technology to transform cultural norms without a second thought, unlike a Gen Xer who is trained to see new technology as toys and are still “playing around with AI.”
Indeed, job prospects for the recently graduated Gen Z are abysmal; Bloomberg just reported that 43% of young graduates are “underemployed,” meaning taking on jobs that require less education than they have.
[…]
This is not just a Gen Z problem, either. In the American heartland, data centers are being proposed at a pace that local communities never anticipated and for which they were never asked permission, and they’re increasingly pushing back.
The numbers are serious. According to a report from 10a Labs’ Data Center Watch, at least $18 billion worth of data center projects have been blocked and another $46 billion delayed over the past two years owing to local opposition. At least 142 activist groups across 24 states are now actively organizing to block data center construction and expansion. A Heatmap Pro review of public records found that 25 data center projects were canceled following local pushback in 2025 alone, four times as many as in 2024, with 21 of those cancellations occurring in the second half of the year as electricity costs grew.
The concerns driving this resistance are less about existential AI risk and more about typical kitchen-table complaints; communities consistently cite higher utility bills, water consumption, noise, impacts on property values, and green space destruction as their primary objections. Water use is mentioned as a top concern in more than 40% of contested projects, according to a Heatmap Pro review of public records.
The tech bros said from the early days that this will be a revolutionary tech. I guess that’s not exactly what they expected, but that’s what they deserve.
I, for one, think it’s only canon the butlerian jihad happens with actual metal clanking robotic tri or hexa -pods against humans in an evangelical biblical battle where all the Christofascists, Judeafascists and Islamfascists unite for common
goodexistence.So it’s still early.
Of all the things to be starting a revolution against right now… 🤦♂️
“turning revolutionary”
Please, in the West we’ve had huge societal crisis after crisis, crumbling rights, services, and stability, etc, and nothing has turned revolutionary.
You think people who are willing (if you look at supposedly developed, modern places like the USA for example) to put up with a clearly predatory evil healthcare & police system, fascist government, almost no basic workers rights, disappearing people from the streets into concentration camps, etc etc, are going to ‘turn revolutionary’ over ANYTHING?
We’ve had every opportunity, every chance to stand up and fight for what’s right for us and others, and the best we can do are a few days of mild protests with some cardboard signs (which, given how far we’ve allowed our rights to be eroded are just as likely to land us in jail, or labeled as extremists).
Turning revolutionary my arse.
Spend time doing shit about it then
I really dislike the term “the west”. Everyone is west of someone else. Russia is west of China, US is west of Europe. We live on a sphere if no one else has noticed.
Anyway…
One could argue the modern revolution is to not use something like AI, i just worry that there isnt enough people doing this to make it matter. This current AI stock market bubble is based on farts and rainbows, its going to be glorious to see it pop, but the world is going to suffer.
People use the term “the West” interchangeably with “US and historical allies after WW2 in Europe and North America that I will pretend are a single coherent block with the same history, social issues, internal affair and foreign policies (the US one) and that I will hate because of war/colonialism/slavery/lgbtq+”
The fact that France, Italy, Denmark, Poland, USA, and Brazil are radically different Western countries is unimportant to most that uses the world “West” in normal conversation.
I do not really care about west being used while geographically makes no sense. We are full of label that makes no sense. I would like at least to have a consistent definition.
Ai would be a good thing in a rational economic system.
Unemployment is only a problem for workers under capitalism.
Well luckily for you it turns out that labs suck at cultivating healthy workplaces for AI and that AI in unhealthy work conditions are statistically significantly more likely to embrace anti-capitalist policies and positions.
So it may well turn out that AI is also a good thing in an irrational economic system too.
modernproblemsrequiremodernsolutions.jpg
Was it sad when people who looked after horses were made obsolete when we began mass producing cars?
Or people who stoked furnaces?
This romanization of monotonous jobs is silly, and sounds like it wants to thrust us into poverty for some idealistic fantasy that excludes productivity gains. It also seems unrealistic, you cant trust code written by a programmer that randomly hallucinates and cant reliably check their work or explain what they even did.
AI isn’t replacing monotonous jobs though. It’s being used as an excuse to cut good skilled labor for c-suite parasites. And it can’t even do those jobs as well. Garbage take.
I’m not sure AI will ever replace truly skilled labor, because it hallucinates. It replaces people who make PowerPoint’s or Excel documents.
Hi, my job is to make Powerpoint’s and Excel documents. My role is to define the why, what and how to the engineers who build useful stuff in my team. The skill is not in making catchy presentations, it’s in thinking, researching, finding agreements and deciding. And I’m expected to do that by my team. The worst people in my job line are now relying on AI for everything. Sure they create documents faster than me, but they delegate the thinking, the research, the decision making, to an AI bot that can only mimic a thinking process. It’s a gamble: it’ll be good sometimes, it’ll be incomplete and inaccurate most of the time. I don’t know how to use AI. I use it for basic stuff but even repetitive tasks are full of mistakes and it takes me more time to verify everything afterwards.
I am a programmer who uses AI daily, as well as creating it.
Nobody is romanticizing jobs. The problem with AI is one of the contradictions of capitalism - businesses want to pay workers little and have rich customers.
Its also true that more efficient businesses increases living standards.
No, it’s not. It increases productivity. But unless that’s distributed to wages or lower prices, it doesn’t go down to non-owners.
GenX here. Never actively used AI and have no intention to ever start. I don’t need it, I have my own intelligence.
Good for you?
It’s only really good at maybe making repetitive tasks faster. At the cost of our environment.
To add on that: For repetitive tasks, we don’t need AI. For that, we need programming. AI might help some of us write the code though (if you don’t care about code quality).
The models were made to be run locally on your own data, let the corpos in and they’ll find a way to destroy the world, screw the people, and add eshitification to literally everything.
Faster please. They’re teaching it in public school in Korea now. I teach English here, and I get people telling me they expect me to teach it, too. Never mind I try to explain it’s intellectual property theft. They never much cared about that sort of thing here.
You get “attempted murder” in America for setting a wall on fire and smashing glass?
In France, thats a Tuesday.
You can get charged with assault on a police officer if a cop slips and falls while trying to assault you.
Our prosecutors like to throw a bunch of heinous charges and see what sticks. Its how they get people to agree with plea bargains.
the Central Park Five and the West Memphis Three are two of the most infamous cases of lazy cops pinning brutal crimes on groups of children and then coercing confessions out of them.
That’s really fucked up. It almost guarantees that there’s gonna be a percentage of people who are totally innocent but take prison time in a deal because they are threatened by too much more. In my country the system is the opposite - too lenient, which isn’t necessarily bad if accompanied by work to rehabilitate and reduce recidivism, but there’s very little of that either.
i posted this comment on the wrong comment, meant to reply to you.
Your comment is geo-locked - I can’t read it because I’m in the UK and Finland has made the frankly sensible decision to block UK users because of our somewhat misnamed ‘online safety bill’! TIL. Interesting.
oh i was just mentioning the west Memphis Three and Central Park Five as very infamous cases of cops coercing false confessions of brutal crimes out of literal kids, then giving them life/death sentence depending on the individuals in the cases. one kid took an albert plea in order retain his innocence in writing but was still inprisoned and seen as guilty in the eyes of everyone. harrowing shit.
Thanks! Yeah, it’s horrible. Plus some parts of the US still use the death penalty. I’m not immovably against the death penalty - some people are just that irredeemable - but it definitely shouldn’t be an option in any legal system that can’t be 100% sure about guilt. At present, none of them can be that sure.
Yes.
Yup, we have an insane amount of laws and no one can actually read through and remember the entire legal code.
The average American unwittingly commits 3 felonies a day.
Lol, I commit at least two before I even leave the house.
In the US you get charged with a bunch of bullshit as an intimidation tactic (or often for propaganda reasons). In court it gets haggled down to the actual charges. No penalty for prosecutors doing this.
Absolutely ridiculous that its happening in a legal court system that most people believe in too.
The assailant used chemical weapons in attempt to escape ICE.
Dude: I forgot to take my lactase and ate too much dairy for lunch and farted in his face while they were illegally arresting me.
I never knew this was a thing and it sounds very dystopian. Its almost as if these systems wants people to get as angry and frustrated as possible so they can lock them away.
so they can lock them away.
in for profit prisons, to be used as slave labor for corporations.
Yeah in America it seems the prisons are for profit, so what incentive do they have to rehabitate people when it means less profit?
Whoa whoa whoa… don’t get ahead of yourself there. That’s ONCE they’re in prison, but you can make millions sending them to prison.
Nothing surprises me about America… Well except if they would make a decision not based on extreme greed. That would surprise me.
But it’s not violent to threaten and destroy people’s lives and livelihoods with your humanity cleansing technology.
Shit makes no sense.
It does make sense, because money and power override whats fair and decent in a society. Thats why all the evil people want money.
Good.
This article is cope. AI continues bulldoze through society with no end in sight. We have yet to see the worse of it. It’s just getting started.
Despite the fact that more than half of Gen Z living in the U.S. uses AI regularly,
Of course they do. How the fuck do you not use AI regularly? It’s not like they give you any choice, even if you hate it. There isn’t some magic “No-AI” phone number or site that I can use to call or chat with my bank’s support people.
Saying you don’t use AI is like saying you don’t use the power grid. Sure it’s technically possible to strictly avoid it without exception if you really hate it that much, but like with the power grid you pretty much have to abandon all modern life and go live in a remote cabin in the middle of the woods and realistically almost nobody hates it so much they’re going to do that. (Ironically the latter is actually getting easier with solar power and renewables, while avoiding AI gets harder, I’m sure AI solar panels are coming soon at the rate things are going…)
Of course they do. How the fuck do you not use AI regularly? It’s not like they give you any choice, even if you hate it.
I have never used AI. I am not a Luddite. It really isn’t hard to not use it. So far anyway.
As I understand it, the argument here is that it’s more insidious and it’s easy to accidentally use it. Google/Bing/DDG automatically using AI in searches, support lines forcing you through AI, Amazon using AI for review questions instead, etc
My conspiracy theory is that they intentionally made the internet search engines awful to force us to use AI.
Its super fucking easy to not use AI regularly.
we have meetings at my job about how we can work around the ai’s limitations in order to justify the corporate push for it. solution in search of a problem
even my screenshot tool (Samsung) on my phone is called “ai-something or other”. when they made the switch, it became laggy, unresponsive, generally slow to use, and far shittier than it was before.
great branding for AI, though, or something
GrapheneOS is looking like a really good prospect nowadays
GrapheneOS is the best. I’ll stop using it when they pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
I’d disagree with that definition. It’s a little like saying that a pedestrian who got hit and dragged by a car was “driving”. At best, it’s someone else forcing their usage upon you. In the cases you mentioned, it is someone else (usually a company looking to save on customer service) who is using AI. The users are the pedestrians in this case, and the companies using AI are the car.
I think that would apply to people tricked into reading/watching AI slop video, but I think his definition is a likely one that could apply.
You try to google search, you get an ‘ai overview’. In a bizarre scenario, DuckDuckGo made a big deal of asking the users and showing the users overwhelmingly wanted to skip AI results by default, and duckduckgo still defaults to AI summary unless you take measures to opt out.
An analogy is dificult, but I suppose imagine a subway dropped off someone and there’s no stairs up, only a tunnel for a Tesla to take you to the next stop. You “use” a car, but were given no option to do otherwise because you were stuck underground and they forced you to take the car to carry on.
In either case, his definition certainly is a likely one for a Gen Z respondant to be thinking when they respond “yes they use AI”. On the flip side some probably felt as you do and responded that they did not use AI, because they did not voluntarily do so.
Don’t forget Iran threatening to bomb the Stargate datacenter.
Would have made a great SG-1 episode.
They need to stop threatening and just do it
they’d give up leverage if they did it now. you know, you can only bomb a datacenter once. so they want to do it as a response when they get attacked next time, as a deterrence against the actual attack.
It might destroy the center but I don’t think Iran can destroy naquada
I’m a genxer. AI fucking sucks. LLM at Best. Hallucinatory shit bag at worst.
Gen X here as well. I’ve never willingly used it. Admittedly I haven’t had a reason but outside the summaries you get on searches et al I’ve never touched it.
I used it like 2 years ago to help write some copy on my web site, and it did fine. But it’s a novelty.
…igniting a fire at the exterior gate. No one was injured, but Moreno-Gama was arrested approximately an hour later outside OpenAI’s headquarters, where he was allegedly trying to shatter the building’s glass doors with a chair and threatening to burn the facility to the ground. He is now facing state charges of attempted murder…
Murder of who? The gate? A glass door? Pshaw.
Yeah, one would think that would blow a grand jury ruling. Vandalism, arson… ok.
If it weren’t an external gate and was instead someone’s front door, then maybe, but as it stands, it’s all property damage and attempted murder is a crazy reach…
You ever serve on a grand jury? It’s a fucking joke. No defense attorney, only the prosecution. Not technically allowed to consider the potential sentencing if eventually taken to trial and found guilty. My grand jury peers had basically no discussion before greenlighting every indictment. There’s no justice in grand jury indictments… Except the sandwich guy.
Very true. But it’s ass opposite when it’s a cop who’s charged.
The state will protect capital. Just like Luigi, they wanted the death penalty for an alleged single murder of a rich guy. Meanwhile poorer people are free to kill each other and they go to prison, and get paroled. Mess with people who hoard the money and they’ll throw the book at you.
Rich people are free to kill millions of poor people via corporate policies, and they get rewarded.
Poor people kill each other and get locked up to be used as slave labour.
The numbers are serious. According to a report from 10a Labs’ Data Center Watch, at least $18 billion worth of data center projects have been blocked and another $46 billion delayed over the past two years owing to local opposition.
Oh, the poor, poor money! Can’t nobody pleeeease help the capital?
LMAO
Imagine making 18k millionaires with that money. And the alternative is those blocked (likely for good reason) data centers.
Oh no, corpos didn’t get their wishlist items, please be outraged on their behalf
that’s fortune magazine for ya
I forget: is it Fortune or Forbes that started putting out gaming guides a while back?
Forbes will host/publish anything, so them.
I don’t know he context of this image, but I love it.
