WHY AREN’T YOUNG PEOPLE MORE INTO AI?
AI’S CAPABILITIES ARE HEATING UP, with most adults now either using AI or worrying about it. But young people’s attitude towards AI is still mostly “meh.”
Why are our youth not running ahead of the pack as with so many other things technological? Why is their reaction to AI pretty much the opposite of their total embrace of smartphones? Why are they not “pulling” AI into their lives, instead of our having to push it on them?
The answer, I believe, is usefulness — that’s the real reason for adopting anything new in life, whether a device or a point of view. When something is immediately useful to us, we grab it just as fast as we can. The new “Alpha” generation grabbed hold of You Tube, texting, and TikTok in just that way. They were also among the first to grab generative AI, because its usefulness to them was blindingly obvious, i.e., to do their homework and school assignments far more quickly and easily. That new ability was, in fact, so useful to them that a great many students started using AI practically from the day it appeared — and its existence was quickly passed virally among students.
The pushback from teachers, of course, was immediate — they saw it as “cheating.” “Don’t you dare use it at all” was their knee-jerk reaction. Fortunately, with time, that initial reaction has calmed down, and at least some teachers now think AI can be useful in schools and are trying to figure out how.
But adults’ and young people’s ideas of “what is useful” is very different. A young person’s goal is to succeed in life — eventually maximizing their purchasing power and life satisfaction — with as little stress as possible. Any tool that helps them do that is useful. But the capability of students to do their assignments and generate ‘A quality work’ in an instant — just by asking AI — is NOT useful to teachers — their goal is to have students “think for themselves” and “do their own work.” Students just want to get their onerous schoolwork over with as quickly as possible — all very aware that they live in a time when most of what is now taught in our schools may very well NOT BE useful in the future. But their teachers still want to build “academic integrity.” Which will be the most useful in the third millennium — getting good work done quickly, or having it be totally your own? I suspect it’s the latter. The three things that will count in the third millennium are your imagination (figuring out what you can do with AI’s help), your self-knowledge (figuring out, with AI’s help, what you want to do) and your ability to get stuff done (real-world accomplishment via collaboration — again with AI’s help.)
Our young people should be asking, “Apart from homework, how can AI help me succeed? They — and we — don’t yet know the answer — and that is why they’re waiting on the sidelines. How AI will better their lives is not yet obvious to young people. It isn’t to most adults either — today every company is struggling to find how AI is useful. But it is absolutely key for the future that we all find out. Everyone should be exploring what useful capabilities AI brings to their life.
Generative AI brings us at least three new capabilities: First, the ability to move much faster. With AI, tasks that took literally years can now take minutes, with no need to build up the experience and technique needed in the past. One can often perform like an expert in just days or weeks. Second, a huge boost in productivity. AI can produce a year’s worth of something (say posts or ad copy) in an instant. A person can now work far less and still get far more done. Third, a new ability to realize dreams, fix problems and help others in ways that we never could before. AI can suggest new digital paths, and create documents or code whenever we ask it to.
I believe that in our times a new symbiosis is being forged between humans and AI (and other new technologies we have developed) — a more comfortable working relationship for the new Third Millennium. This new symbiosis, still aborning, is the next step in our human evolution. The key human components of this symbiosis will be Imagination — applied through creativity and innovation — Self-knowledge — applied through choice of goals and purpose — and Real-world Accomplishment — applied as getting important, real-world tasks done.
Today none of those things are taught in our schools — and none are considered priorities for young humans. I predict our young people will become deeply interested in AI — and start bonding symbiotically with it — just as soon as they figure out how doing so will help them succeed.