(Ok, this is a test case. The article is about Gen Z in general but is relevant to Australia. The author is an Australian academic. I am not sure if this fits into the ‘Australia’ community. Mods, please advise)
Many young people are left feeling as though they no longer have any meaningful stake in a system that demands their compliance while it systematically engineers their obsolescence.
As social psychologist Shoshana Zuboff puts it, we are living in a
harsh social habitat produced by a decades-old regime of neoliberal market economics in which our sense of self-worth and need for self-determination are routinely thwarted.
Indeed, younger generations face a unique existential crisis as algorithms increasingly shape taste, preferences, decisions and more. Teens are “living inside a contradiction”, encouraged to embrace AI while they report it’s hurting their learning.
In the 20th century, baby boomers had greater agency over how much technology was integrated into their lives, and there was more opportunity to opt out. Studies show older generations were able to evaluate their adoption of technology based on factors like “compatibility with lifestyle” and affordability. Email and mobile phones weren’t viewed as essential to everyday life, nor was upgrading to a clock radio or a TV with a remote control considered as “inevitable” as having an AI chatbot on your smartphone is today.
Today, AI and algorithms feel unavoidable to younger generations, because they’re built into the very fabric of society. Tech CEOs argue the dominance of AI is inevitable, but the people in power aren’t engaging in dialogue with younger generations.
The problem is they read about how truly horrible data centers are, then read that the data centers are being used to run AI, and assume that the two concepts are inseparable.
You can utilize AI without a data center, and it causes less harm to the planet than eating a hamburger.
This is a symptom of using the over-broad, deliberately vague marketing term “AI”.
If you can create (train) it without huge-scale violation of consent, without huge scale copyright infringement, without huge scale badly-treated human labour for labelling and refining, without huge-scale electricity and water consumption?
Then it isn’t the “AI” being discussed in the article and therefore irrelevant to the point.
I concur. I wonder how long until the general public figures out the distinction.