Young Americans increasingly fear AI will take their jobs

(pewresearch.org)

26 points | by 01-_- 10 hours ago ago

14 comments

  • wduquette 43 minutes ago ago

    Young Americans have been fed a constant diet of “the Modern World is Awful” and “You Are Doomed” for quite some time now. This is just the next round, and as always it is overstated.

  • hunglee2 9 hours ago ago

    and those young American's would be right.

    AI's impact on employment is less directly replacing a human worker one to one, but suppressing hiring demand by providing potential employers with a plausible alternative to increasing headcount. This is disproportionately impacting early entry hiring as the ramp up time to productivity for inexperienced workers is today too long for companies to willingly invest for.

    • burnt-resistor 6 hours ago ago

      Never depend on a megacorp shit job for stability.

      The way out is unionizing and workers coming together to form a worker-owned co-op business with other good people, a very low turnover rate, and a civilized environment. They don't need a megacorp and can find markets themselves.

      • throwaway_7274 5 hours ago ago

        What if even unions no longer have leverage?

  • skew-aberration 8 hours ago ago

    It's interesting how stable the numbers are. The GPT-3 to 4 leap made a dent but it was followed by the pre-training plateau. I would have expected the huge leap with agentic AI since late 2025/early 2026 to be reflected in these numbers.

    • mono442 7 hours ago ago

      agent ai is barely used for anything outside of software engineering

      • coldtea 6 hours ago ago

        AI has been used to replace low-tier call support, graphic designers, and translators, to name a few.

      • ido 7 hours ago ago

        software engineering was one of the best ways for working- and middle-class kids to make a good living. I suspect it held a fairly large % of "good jobs available to kids without rich parents" (far larger than its % of overall jobs).

        • bragh 6 hours ago ago

          Unattractive nerdy kids being able to escape generational poverty thanks to programming skills is what broke law, business and politics caste members minds. It is unfathomable that somebody could be paid well for a job when they didn't even do Erasmus program or have an internship in EU or NATO office.

          • burnt-resistor 6 hours ago ago

            The Epstein class needs a desperate precariat living in favelas to scare the middle class into working more for less. $50T of wealth transfer upward since the 1971 Powell memo[0] and the introduction of so-called "trickle-down economics" of neoliberalism, the liquidation of the middle class has been the primary goal and wildly successful. No amount of voting for neoliberal Democrats or Republicans, two sides beholden to the same master, would ever change anything apart from the momentary blip that was Carter because there were very few politicians interested in We the People for 45 years. Corporate and capital gains tax cuts and non-enforcement of anti-trust laws led to perverse incentives that cut wages, drove offshoring, stock buybacks, and the rise of extreme wealth and inequality, and megacorps.

            0. https://archive.org/details/PowellMemorandum-AttackOnAmerica...

  • dude250711 8 hours ago ago

    They do not mind ageism though, so it's all good.

  • jaggs 9 hours ago ago

    Water is wet. News at 10.

  • aaron695 5 hours ago ago

    [dead]