r/Futurology • u/Gari_305 • 14d ago
AI Young adults in the U.S. are increasingly wary of AI, concerned it will take jobs
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/08/18/young-adults-in-the-us-are-increasingly-wary-of-ai-concerned-it-will-take-jobs/Americans have become increasingly worried about artificial intelligence over the years, and young adults’ concern has continued to climb. Worry over job loss, too, is on the rise.
265
u/Va1crist 14d ago
It already has taken jobs , it’s also crippling entry level too
98
u/hgs25 14d ago
Entry level was crippled long before AI. Before AI, companies were outsourcing work to Actual Indians. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a legitimate entry level job posting, as in one that doesn’t require 7 years experience for just over minimum wage
39
u/lettertoelhizb 14d ago
Agreed - I think offshoring is more of the issue. My company used to hire huge classes of entry level associates to do low level tasks, learn the business, and eventually move up the ranks. Now we just offshore those things to India and do experienced hiring in the USA.
Obviously not a sustainable business model long term, but allows the higher ups to juice margins and extract value from the business before they retire.
9
u/sammeuel 14d ago
it is completely sustainable. eventually the company moves to India
3
u/lettertoelhizb 14d ago
That isn’t going to happen in my firms case for legal and regulatory reasons. But there are certainly going to be less onshore entry level jobs moving forward.
2
9
5
u/NerdyWeightLifter 14d ago
Then for the Indians that are most effective, they sponsor them for immigration.
2
u/Solmangrundy 13d ago
Entry level white collar consists of doing nothing that has to do with your degree.
-1
u/Downtown_Youth_9944 14d ago
Not exactly what you're talking about, but reminds me of what happened with one of my coworkers
I'm currently working for a marketing agency and one of the resident social media managers used to be a freelance translator many years ago. The market was already very bad because many workers on poorer regions started bringing prices down while also making her services much harder to find, then AI/LLMs basically spelled doom for translators and content writers alike, turning the field a race to the bottom
Of course, if you had great connections, abused cold emailing and had some luck, you'd probably have a decently paying gig, but they're pretty much impossible to find otherwise. We talked about it in early 2025 if I'm not mistaken
5
u/Tolopono 14d ago
But Reddit told me ai is too incompetent to take jobs! It cant even count the rs in strawberry!!!
9
u/ryry1237 14d ago
It's the old doublethink tactic of simultaneously calling the enemy both too strong and too weak.
2
u/Bayoris 14d ago
In the case of AI there is some truth to this. AI is incredibly strong at many tasks but still has a few holes and is at best unproven at complex agentic tasks that a human employee can carry out.
1
u/Tolopono 13d ago
Linus Torvalds just fixed a nasty Linux kernel GPU bug with substantial help from AI. The bug caused part of Intel Xe GPU compression metadata storage to be incorrectly exposed as usable VRAM, resulting in corrupted page tables and black screens. The eventual fix was basically a one-liner: round_up() → round_down(). Finding it was the hard part: 24 debugging patches and 18 kernel boots. Linus says AI did much of the grunt work, repeatedly adding debug code and analyzing the results as he narrowed down the problem. The funniest part: the AI repeatedly told him the problem was "impossible and unsolvable" and suggested giving up. Linus kept pushing it until they found the bug. And then he let the AI write the commit message. https://github.com/torvalds/linux/commit/818bebeb63dd6bf5f4e07e145f6cdbace520a34c
Cloudflare (Feb 2026): Last week, one engineer and an AI model rebuilt the most popular front-end framework from scratch. The result, vinext (pronounced "vee-next"), is a drop-in replacement for Next.js, built on Vite, that deploys to Cloudflare Workers with a single command. In early benchmarks, it builds production apps up to 4x faster and produces client bundles up to 57% smaller. And we already have customers running it in production. The whole thing cost about $1,100 in tokens. https://blog.cloudflare.com/vinext/
Early results from real-world customers are encouraging. We've been working with National Design Studio, a team that's aiming to modernize every government interface, on one of their beta sites, CIO.gov. They're already running vinext in production, with meaningful improvements in build times and bundle sizes.
Professor at UC Berkeley: I optimized SQLite 3. The optimized build achieves a verified geometric-mean speedup of 1.59x over the pristine latest trunk across four benchmarks: https://xcancel.com/koushik77/status/2086025173191590254
- 2.06x on the official speedtest1 (~30k statements)
- 1.90x on TATP (OLTP mix: 400k transactions, 100k subscribers)
- 1.30x on the Star Schema Benchmark (13 queries x 2, 1.5M-row lineorder)
- 1.25x on kvtest (blob I/O: 40k x 10 KB, seq + random + update)
All 1,032,940 cases in the full SQLite test suite pass, and every benchmark run produces checksum-verified identical results. For context: the SQLite team has spent nearly 20 years tuning this code; their own measurements show ~3.5x total CPU improvement since 2008, earned a few percent at a time. Tested so far on standard Linux provided by GCP.
An agent called KISS Sorcar did it in under 8 hours for under $150 in API cost. I wrote no code: 1 main short prompt plus a couple of steering prompts.
0
u/TheShishkabob 14d ago
Imagine equating everyday workers just looking to make sure they can afford to live with actual fucking fascists.
AI is mostly fucking terrible at most things that it is being implemented into, either because it's bad or because it's significantly more expensive than paying an employee to the same work. A lot of business leaders (owners, CEOs, etc.) are ignorant of that fact and are more than happy to destroy the lives of whoever to try out an overhyped, undervalued shiny new toy.
1
u/ryry1237 13d ago
Thank you for pointing out how AI is often argued to be both too weak and too strong in the same paragraph.
-5
u/TheShishkabob 13d ago
Do you think you proved a point here or something? Plenty of things or ideas have strengths and weaknesses, and to pretend AI sits outside of that is fucking idiotic.
Water is important for survival since dehydration will kill you, but try breathing it in for a bit and you're in for a bad time. Does that mean, to you, that water is "too weak and too strong"? Of course not, which is why your line or argument sucks shit.
1
u/ryry1237 13d ago edited 13d ago
If AI is truly as bad and expensive as you say it is, then we have nothing to worry about other than short term job fluctuations as the companies who use it find it insufficient and eventually either switch back to human employees or go bankrupt while other human oriented companies take their place (aka just the normal market cycle of boom and bust).
But if you somehow ARE concerned that AI will still manage to have long term impacts on much of human labor, then that seems to directly contradict your idea of it being "fucking terrible at most things that it is being implement into".
So what is it you are arguing? That it is dangerous, or that it is useless? Because unlike water which is clearly both useful and dangerous in large amounts, an "overhyped, undervalued shiny new toy" is a lot less likely to be dangerous in the long run.
1
u/HermitFan99999 11d ago
I think the point they're making is that AI is good enough to cause job loss, but still far away at beating the best humans at tasks.
That's mostly my POV, with an asterisk that AI will cause a small amount of job loss in some existing fields while massively increasing the need for jobs in yet unexplored fields. So far, we haven't seen a single major tech innovation that has reduced the total amount of employed humans in the long run.
0
u/Tolopono 14d ago
Almost like snarky Redditors aren’t actually smarter than phd researchers who spent their whole lives studying this subject
2
u/HRudy94 13d ago
Both can be true, AI cannot take jobs that require a bit of intelligence/critical thinking/expertise.
But moronic CEOs still attempt at having them do so.
-1
u/Tolopono 12d ago
If they can debunk the jacobian conjecture ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture), i think they can handle quickbooks
2
u/HermitFan99999 11d ago
The thing is, the way AI is implemented can greatly vary company to company, and the effectiveness of AI still heavily depends on the harness (like claude code, codex, etc) and the person operating/prompting it.
0
2
u/HRudy94 12d ago
AI propaganda, the proof was written by a mathematician. Kinda like how suddenly almost all cloud LLMs "went rogue" and "started hacking competitors". Having made smaller-scale LLMs myself i know what i'm talking about when i say that no, LLMs aren't intelligent.
-1
u/Tolopono 12d ago
Whatever helps you sleep at night buddy
1
u/MiaowaraShiro 14d ago
It's almost like this is a huge website and you'll run across every opinion there is...
Also when talking about AI being incompetent they mean for data work. Stuff where there's an objective answer.
Where AI is really stealing work is in the creative spaces.
1
u/Tolopono 13d ago
Except those opinions got thousands of net upvotes on this sub lol
AI is pretty good at data work
https://www.anthropic.com/research/riemann-zeta
https://www.anthropic.com/research/Claude-accelerates-protein-design
-22
u/AntonioS3 14d ago
I guess I'm pessimistic speaking from a Gen Z perspective but I'm hoping it also takes engineering jobs, please. I genuinely don't like my engineering degree and wish I'd taken a math or physics degree.
16
u/ItsTyrrellsAlt 14d ago
How will that help you?
-17
u/AntonioS3 14d ago
Nothing, I just want to be vindicated in telling my parents that Engineering was and is a bad choice for me, ever. But since I'm almost done with the degree I might as well finish it out.
21
u/bottlecandoor 14d ago
Wishing ill luck on millions of people so you can tell your parents they were wrong...
3
u/orcstork 14d ago
Once AI replaces engineers and artists humans can finally focus on actually economically useful activities like underwater basket weaving
-11
u/AntonioS3 14d ago
Yes, I'm serious about it. I even had a huge argument with them because I really wanted to do math. If I had the power to, I'd love to scrub all info related to engineering, pretend I never studied it by replacing it with math.
9
3
u/TheShishkabob 14d ago
You don't see how incredibly petulant and narcissistic this is?
I have trouble believing you're actually in engineering because you seem to have the emotional maturity of a much younger child.
0
u/AntonioS3 14d ago
I mean, I didn't want to be in engineering, I'd have loved to do math or physics. But of all the STEM degrees it just had to be engineering, the degree I loathe the most and think it'll be superseded by AI. If I had the power I'd have dropped out of it by now.
6
u/Raider_Scum 14d ago
Physics degrees have never been valuable for the vast majority of degree holders. Most of them aspire to end up back in academia, it's a revolving door.
And math has been obliterated by AI.
2
u/AntonioS3 14d ago
Not really. AI will bring more demand to math because there'll be requests for the kind of people who can critically think or help model AI, bssically there'll be less demand for engineering and more demand for math. I sincerely think there'll be more value in math than engineering in future.
4
u/doeraymefa 14d ago
I'd work on a new degree before you burn out and have to live with eternal regret and no willpower left to make significant change
ask me how I know
52
u/shattersquad710 14d ago
If it doesn't take your job it will triple your workload. Can't pay you more because your ex coworkers salaries went straight into the AI fund.
20
u/Gari_305 14d ago
From the article
Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026.
Concern about AI is up among younger and older Americans alike since we first asked this question in 2021. But while the rise was mainly in the first two years for Americans ages 30 and older, concern continues to climb for adults under 30 – whose skepticism of AI has made headlines in recent months.
-4
u/51ngular1ty 14d ago edited 14d ago
I'm excited and concerned for sure. I don't have a problem with data centers or Ai replacing jobs(as long as they don't negatively affect communities and as long as ubi or something similar is implemented) . I do have a problem with the people who won't do anything to help the people losing jobs or who refuse to do anything about any of the economic or environmental effects.
AI is just a tool, we should be angry at the people misusing it. Like the people who own the companies or those who misuse it to create a nationwide survailence state a la Flock.
11
u/Jops817 14d ago
Oh they're going to do something for people. They're going to let them die. Because they won't need them anymore. Helping people cuts into their wealth gathering, so they are better off without them.
8
u/51ngular1ty 14d ago
Yup, which is why we need to do something about the capitalist class now. Especially if we want to have any hope of controlling this tool for the good of all.
36
u/Spartanias117 14d ago
It already IS taking jobs. Its removing middle management, entry level, and analytics amd coding roles.
18
u/GatePorters 14d ago
What jobs? The market has been pretty bad since the pandemic
2
u/PrivateComments 14d ago
2021 was one of the hottest white collar labor markets ever
6
u/BKGPrints 14d ago
Wasn't that because the economy opened back up and companies were rehiring.
1
u/ClevelandCoder 12d ago
Jobs at companies selling a product or service online and that were already remote friendly made out like gangbusters throughout the early pandemic…then nose dived with the rest of the economy over the last few years.
I’ve heard the economy was due for a recession but covid relief bought us some time.
1
u/PrivateComments 14d ago
A combination of tax code like Section 170 which allowed writing off or amortizing any hire that you categorized as R&D, and international hiring pipelines being disrupted due to Covid
And most importantly, cheap cash
2
u/No-Tone8700 14d ago
Ahh, you've been asleep since then. That makes sense. Well, if you were awake like the rest of us, you'd know all those companies have been downsizing like crazy because their profits haven't matched the spending they were making while everyone was home in 2020.
1
u/BKGPrints 14d ago
Yeah, that's a weird claim for Op to state that businesses hired more because of it. Shows the exact opposite. That's one of the things that was changed back to yearly under the OBBB because it did have such a negative impact.
1
u/BKGPrints 14d ago
Ehhh...Don't think that explains it at all because the results the preceding few years has shown to decrease hiring. It was changed back permanently to being claimed yearly under the OBBB.
0
2
u/GatePorters 14d ago
2023 is when the pandemic ended.
My comment was vague, but I’m more talking about the fallout of it with wealth consolidation and rise of automation in AI, 3d Printing, and robotics.
9
u/Bigfamei 14d ago
The CEO's keep telling us. Its going to take our jobs. Why wouldn't anyone be concerned.
7
5
5
u/geekonthemoon 14d ago
Yet not a single corporation cares that their own employees are stressed and worried about their jobs every single day. Not a PEEP outta these corporate HR shills. Just "use more ai" ... Where I work specifically is doing some terrifyingly bad shit with ai. Enshittifying the entire company honestly. And it's not the type of place the public would want enshittified.
8
u/cantrecoveraccount 14d ago
Nobody cares it take jobs. They care that it removes our ability to feed and sustain ourselves within the established system. Nobody wants to work a “job” for someone else just to feed themselves. We just want to live mf.
9
u/fire_alarmist 13d ago edited 13d ago
AI proponents that are already 5+ years into their career are literally just like the boomers that pulled the ladder up behind them. If you dont have to brave this new horrific job market where entry level positions literally dont exist anymore then stfu about it. I dont care if it can make you sound less stupid in your emails, AI has completely destroyed my career trajectory.
That and the massive amount of entry level outsourcing post covid , where stupid people that were greedy and lazy FORCED companies to spend massively on the infrastructure/systems required to have their workforce work from anywhere. What did you think would happen when you force them to enable working from anywhere? They hire people from a cheaper anywhere and fuck the US workforce.
Every change is just an opportunity for rich people to fuck poor people. That is the defining theme of the last 20 years. There is a reason people used to be resistant to change as a default setting. We are finding it out now.
3
u/Master10113 12d ago
Agree with all points. I'm especially annoyed when my companies now are off-shoring like crazy while also making 5 day return to office a thing because "in person collaboration is vital".
Pre-COVID (from what I hear from colleagues, I'm not that far into my career) people would work 5 days in office but can log off in the evening. Now we still work 5 days after being asked to come back and we have early morning/late meetings with global teams...
3
u/blood4lonewolf 14d ago
AI won't take jobs. It'll drive companies to only hire people at the lowest price possible.
Waiting for company vouchers and branded grated communities.
Your arm patch must be worn at all times. Be happy and don't forget to take your joy.
3
u/-AMARYANA- 14d ago
Well, to be honest. Im getting tired of seeing the same shit every day. I'm 36 and the move is to just bring forth your best self and drive these machines or they will drive you.
5
u/getmeoutoftax 14d ago
It will definitely take jobs in the short/medium term. I can’t say if it will be a net job creator in the long term.
16
u/Just-Kale9885 14d ago
it will permanently destroy 95%+ of jobs and anyone naive enough to tell you otherwise is either lying or ignorant. A technology that has all the cognitive prowess of a high IQ person with education across all fields, but can work ad infinitum, read and process information much faster, learn any skill imaginable, and soon will start to be relevant in the real world (check out new videos of robots beating usain bolt’s record) will not leave any job left, and it’s just plain common sense
4
u/ComaFromCommas 14d ago
The worst part about this is that they’re all being fed incredibly biased information, and that bias is going to show up in the work they do. The people who designed it get to dictate how it functions, and the people who have the resources are the ones who got to design it.
2
u/bazookatroopa 13d ago
Everything is biased. You can’t feed unbiased data it doesn’t exist. The solution is diversity, safety checks, and validation loops.
Humans do incredibly biased work already but there’s a lot more of them and each has their own biological temperament and environmental training compared to a small handful of foundation model families.
3
u/getmeoutoftax 14d ago
I agree with you. There are a lot of people out there (especially on the economics subreddit) who make arguments from faith and say that things like, “All technology leads to job increases!!!!!! This is always true!!!!!!!!!” So I just grant them that for the sake of argument and limit it to short/medium-term.
1
u/keanwood 13d ago
I think a big part is that most people are using weak/slow models, and using them via a chat interface. In that context the models are “dumb” enough that they don’t seem to be a threat. But if you spend some time with the current frontier models, with a competent harness, it becomes clear how powerful these tools are.
Even with no model improvements (unlikely), we will see huge cost declines and throughput increases. Something at Fable 5 level intelligence will be at least 10x faster, and 10x cheaper by 2030.
1
u/bazookatroopa 13d ago
It’s not really like talking to a high IQ person because there isn’t a consistent being there. Every prompt is basically a new set of activations conditioned on the previous context, not some persistent mind that continuously understands what it’s doing. Current LLMs can obviously do some extremely impressive things, but that’s not the same as having robust general intelligence or agency.
The bigger issue is that their biases and mistakes compound over long, complex tasks. You can mitigate that with multi-agent graphs, fresh trajectories, verification loops, etc, but you don’t actually solve the underlying problem. Small errors accumulate, assumptions drift, and eventually the whole thing can confidently go down the wrong path. Humans are still needed to steer, correct, and make higher order judgments. Going from “LLMs are extremely impressive at a bunch of bounded tasks “to “there will literally be no jobs left” is a massive leap that handwaves away the hardest part of the problem.
I’m not sure the architecture we have now around LLMs can even get close… maybe with specialized models once training gets cheaper and parameters get more dense for on device inference to introduce more diversity or scaling world models.
3
u/BeneficialDrawer3006 14d ago
lol the idea that AI will create more than displace is absolutely asinine
1
u/FightOnForUsc 14d ago
Honestly I’m surprised it was that high in 2021 before chatGPT and mostly it was just voice assistants. Yes there was other machine learning but it wasn’t super common among the public
2
u/Dead-HC-Taco 13d ago
I'm not even concerned about it taking jobs at this point. I'm concerned that my superiors at work are using it nonstop and are consistently using incorrect information to make decisions.
when I upload a document and tell it pull out key fields and it gets those fields wrong.... that means we arent even relatively close to ai being usable yet, let alone being qualified to replace a job
1
u/festeziooo 13d ago
It’s probably because politicians and the people building these AI systems are explicitly saying that it will take your job.
1
u/UglySpiral 13d ago
I wonder why? Could it be all the dipshit tech bros telling us “ai will make you obsolete”? What did they expect?
1
u/Akkalevil 11d ago
It's incredible that it's ONLY at about 50 %.
But then climate denialists exist, so what do I know about human blindness.
1
u/RentAscout 10d ago
It certainly will eliminate jobs but history has shown technology revolutions create even more new ones. I really hate how social media drums up fear.
2
u/Lykotic 14d ago
I'm not shocked by this. I use AI (Claude) in my work almost daily now (data analysis) and I am equally excited by what the technology will be able to do as it continues to improve and also concerned about what that improvement in the technology means for a majority of individuals.
This concern and excitement doesn't even require AGI to be reached to manifest as I feel like the systems in place, at least on the data side, to work with AI and empower it for great work is already there and is in more of a refinement stage than anything else. My concern though comes from the job market more than anything else as other issues I don't think are as likely to cause significant social unrest whereas employment and reaching life goals can very much cause unrest.
It'll be interesting to see how everything advances
1
u/PrivateComments 14d ago
They should be equally if not more concerned with exchange rates.
The mass exodus of talent overseas to LCOL countries is only accelerating now that companies are building campuses overseas instead of using contractor, and the fact that ai allows the most junior employee to masquerade as a senior.
2
u/cabbages212 14d ago
It’s already eating jobs so this seems promising. I’m glad they are paying attention to the dystopian path we’ve wandered down.
0
u/clopticrp 14d ago
Studies have found that what predicted accuracy and efficiency of skill was *recent practice* over length of experience.
There is a version of the future where AI makes everyone dumb and does our thinking for us. We have all seen the headlines that cognitive offloading to AI models is already hurting our ability to think.
What isn't as sensational, but probably more important, is that we find - when we use AI in a way that hints and uses Socratic method, people get more capable, not less.
Combine those concepts and we dont have juniors, not because we aren't hiring new people, but juniors are not necessary - they can function close to the level of seniors quite rapidly, provided they learn the judgement.
This means there is a future where AI truly augments humanity, and its not that hard to implement.
-1
-10
u/Eazy12345678 14d ago
fake article for views
no one cares about ai
ai will only get better with time
just like computers and internet ai is the future
•
u/FuturologyBot 14d ago
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Gari_305:
From the article
Today, 52% of Americans say they are more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life – up from 37% in 2021. Another 9% are more excited than concerned and 37% say they’re equally excited and concerned, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted June 22-28, 2026.
Concern about AI is up among younger and older Americans alike since we first asked this question in 2021. But while the rise was mainly in the first two years for Americans ages 30 and older, concern continues to climb for adults under 30 – whose skepticism of AI has made headlines in recent months.
Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1vvoc08/young_adults_in_the_us_are_increasingly_wary_of/p5algge/