Nearly half of adults under 30 say AI does more harm than good. AI tools get significantly better every month. Belief in them does not.
These aren’t people who haven’t tried them. They’re the ones with the tools open all day.
That breaks a pattern we’ve counted on for decades. The young adopt technology, believe in it, and pull the rest of us forward. Not this time. When you ask them what worries them, they don’t lead with jobs. They say it changes how people think and connect.
Here are some examples from previous technologies:
- Social media promised connection; it delivered engagement optimization.
- The smartphone arrived as a tool and became a tether.
- Self-checkout promised speed; it delivered unpaid labor and a machine hollering about the bagging area.
None of these failed, exactly. But in each case, the efficiency went one direction, and the friction went the other. By the time anyone noticed, opting out wasn’t really an option.
The generation raised dealing with these issues and more is now being handed a fourth. Their skepticism isn’t ignorance about technology. It’s fluency in the business model.
So, what should we do? Here are a few suggestions:
Learn what not to feed it. Assume anything typed into a chatbot may be stored and used to train the next version. Keep out personal information, business records, account numbers, medical details, passwords, etc. Check every number, date and name before you act on it. These tools sometimes hallucinate and can be wrong with confidence.
Keep the human parts human. Drafts and form letters: fine. A condolence note or apology: no. Say when you’ve used it. A note costs nothing; getting called out costs plenty. Anything that makes a neighbor feel handled instead of helped is trading trust for speed.
Spend an hour with it on real work. Take something you did last week — a quote, a schedule, a letter you dreaded — and make the tool do it. You’ll learn more in that hour about where it helps and where it falls apart than in a year of reading about it. If it’s for your business, pick a task that repeats, and decide where the saved time goes before you save it. Unclaimed time just fills back up.
AI is still early enough that the decision is ours, not the companies building it. The person choosing whether to let it answer the phone, how to respond to an email, or whether to sit it between them and their child’s homework is still in the driver’s seat.
That window closes once AI gets embedded and the defaults harden.
The 24-year-olds are right to watch it closely. The rest of us should, too.
Ken Tolcou runs AI Upside Group, a San Diego AI consulting and IT services firm.
Any content, resident submissions, guest columns, advertisements, and advertorials are not necessarily endorsed by or represent the views of Best Version Media LLC (BVM) or any municipality, homeowners associations, businesses, or organizations that this publication serves. BVM is not responsible for the reliability, suitability, or timeliness of any content submitted, inclusive of materials generated or composed through artificial intelligence (AI). All content submitted is done so at the sole discretion of the submitting party.
