Recent college grads are not very fond of commencement speakers hyping up a technology they see as a threat to their career prospects
A 2025 Harvard poll of young people in the US found that a majority see AI as a threat to their career prospects. Pagel and his peers are entering a job market where AI’s efficiency is already being used to justify mass layoffs. While it’s unclear which jobs may be entirely replaced by AI – and whether AI could eventually create more career pathways than it destroys – recent graduates are feeling betrayed.
“We’ve been pushed our entire lives to get our diplomas. Then you pulled the rug out from underneath us, and said: ‘Oh, you know those four years you spent learning how to do very specific things, you don’t need to do it any more,’” Pagel says. “We can get a computer to do it for two-thirds the price.”
Personally I think it’s due to the fact that for a lot of older people the progress of technology has been a massive boon to them regardless of how imlong it took for them to adopt it. Boomers and elder Gen X got to experience the technological boom of the post war period with minimal issues from said tech. Younger Gen X and elder Millennials saw some of it but also generally experienced the a lot of the early downsides of it all it. Younger Millennials and elder Gen Z saw it all be automated and rat fucked to the point of uselessness in a lot of cases for example finding a job. And I’m pretty sure younger Gen Z and elder Gen Alpha are gonna burn society to the ground, rightly so.