Poll is from Pew Research

  • came_apart_at_Kmart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    49·
    22 days ago

    65 is not just “older” it’s “old”. these are retired people with landlines who watch cable TV and play farmville on facebook. might as well be aliens. kinda curious what the 31-64 year olds think.

    in my day to day, the only identifiable cohorts of people who seem to think “AI” is cool are

    • people who are admittedly bad at computer
    • that genre of guy who tries to appear to be good at computer, but is actually bad at computer. you know the type: very active on linkedin socially, uses buzzword salad from futurist TEDx talks, conflates LLMs with AGI, tron funkopop, apple watch, NFTs, would be absolutely blown away by this presentation, etc.
  • Dort_Owl [they/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    34·
    22 days ago

    I don’t think the idea that all new technology is loved by young people is correct. Boomers love AI and are addicted to social media too. They love that shit.

    I think what is more likely is that people of certain demographics are more susceptible to marketing and peer pressure than others. I even think that a lot of times there are a lots of reasons why a product might not take off that is independent of demographics altogether a lot of the time

    Capitalists want a simple, measurable, predicable market of constant growth and regular periodic innovation but sometimes real life doesn’t work like that. Innovation and technology doesn’t move in a gradual straight line like a video game tech tree. It’s sporadic, has offshoots, sometimes doesn’t change for a long time and other times changes very quickly. Not all of it is useful or long lasting, some is. You can’t force it in the same way Disney can’t just force people to like the movies they churn out periodically just because they ticked all the right boxes. It has to be natural, in the right place at the right time.

    I don’t know if I’m making any sense lol

    • TreadOnMe [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      19·
      22 days ago

      Real life is not a Civ game with known quantities and tech trees, where you know exactly how much gold, food, culture and tech points you are going to get next turn.

      Which is why Elon Musk’s favorite game is Persepolis, which is Civ on mobile for children.

    • mar_k [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      15·
      22 days ago

      Always surprises me how the generation who grew up with newspapers and black & white TV almost have a tendency to be more brainrotted and slop-obsessed than digital natives?

      I’m 22, I was watching Annoying Orange on an ipad in 3rd grade, yet now I can easily watch a 3 hour indie slowburn film if I like the premise. Meanwhile my parents will be so hooked to something on their phone, that they don’t even realize when someone is saying their name or trying to talk to them? I’ve seen that in a lot of older people, like they almost fall in a trance where they don’t perceive the world outside their phone, but never a younger person

    • InexplicableLunchFiend [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      14·
      22 days ago

      Social Media first gained popularity due to young people though, they were the early adopters. Old people came in later. Myspace and Facebook were both for teenagers/college students.

      • Dort_Owl [they/them, any]@hexbear.netEnglish
        8·
        22 days ago

        You’re right, that’s true. Maybe social media probably wasn’t the best example on my part, lol

        My point still stands though, yes, a lot of the time new tech is embraced by young people, but a lot isn’t and AI is one of those times. Survivorship bias makes us forget all of the new toys that didn’t catch on. Especially as capitalism enters it’s later stages and enshittification makes these products low quality earlier and earlier on

        Then you have the recent(ish) problem of the market starting to try and invent new tech for the sole purpose of being an investment for wealthy people, like NFTs and the Metaverse. Sometimes they’re not even trying to make something useful, they’re just making something and hoping if they convince everyone hard enough it will become the next big thing

        I think humans have a habit of thinking that the way things have been during their short lives is a cycle that has been happening forever, but the capitalism of today is very different than the capitalism of 20 or even 10 years ago, I think young peoples skepticism of AI is just one sign of that

        I guess I’m just trying to say is technological progress is more complicated and unpredicable than markets like to pretend it is

    • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      22 days ago

      I don’t think the idea that all new technology is loved by young people is correct.

      Yeah, I think that was just an 80s-2000s thing where computers were still niche enough that someone stuck in their ways could delude themselves into thinking that they were no more important an invention than microwave ovens, while anyone who bothered learning about them would find real, tangible benefits, with new capabilities every single year. Then in the 2010s Grandma got a Facebook and the best you could expect to get from computer skills was reduced to a fairly cushy job.

  • microfiche [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
    28·
    22 days ago

    The younger generations are the ones who are going to have to deal with the cancer that AI is. Dinosaurs will die soon, and so it isn’t anything more than a novelty to them. I mean wtf are old folks using AI for exactly? Creating cat photos and images of trump as jesus?

    Meanwhile it will eventually be used to replace every wage worker it can, which will affect everyone who is ever born in perpetuity or until humanity dies.

    • mar_k [he/him]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      34·
      22 days ago

      I think the internet, social media, smartphones, etc. had a much higher learning gap when they came out, and oldheads were often very bitter for being slow to it… but AI is dumb easy to use. Anyone and everyone can be the next Thomas Kinkade! The only serious learning gap is the ability to distinguish real or fake content: but they genuinely dgaf

      Whenever I tell my boomer dad his facebook slop is AI, his attitude is always “so what?” And he often favorites AI “art” or Sora comedy slop even when he sees that it’s labelled as AI

      A couple years ago he poked fun at me for liking animation because “cartoons are for little kids,” so I tried getting him to watch Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies to prove how much soulful expression can be poured into animation. He didn’t have the attention span for it and started scrolling on Facebook. Same with Scavenger’s Reign (highly recommend), he just told me it was boring and weird.

      I often feel like art is the language of the human soul, but some people have become so detached from themselves/others that they can no longer read that language

    • bunnossin [she/her, it/its]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      22 days ago

      Meanwhile it will eventually be used to replace every wage worker it can, which will affect everyone who is ever born in perpetuity or until humanity dies.

      I feel like there’s an option missing here, but I can’t put my finger on it…