Generation Z has been nervous for a while. Unsettled. Worried. And they are starting to say it out loud.
Two speakers were booed at graduation ceremonies in the US for talking about AI. First Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive, at the University of Central Florida. She said “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution”. The graduates interrupted her with booing.
Then Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, at the University of Arizona, stated “you will help shape artificial intelligence” and the reaction was so intense he had to speak over the noise. Schmidt continued: “when someone offers you a seat on a rocket, you don’t ask which seat — you just get on”. The audience was not grateful.
The curious thing is that these were not technical conferences. They were university graduation ceremonies. The moment a generation celebrates reaching the finish line of its education and entering the labour market. That the booing happened there is no coincidence.
Generation Z grew up with an implicit promise: study, get qualified, start at the bottom, learn, climb. The first job, however precarious, was the step up. The entry door. And it turns out that precisely that step — the junior, entry-level job, the one nobody wants but everyone needs to have had — is the first one AI is eliminating. Not the work of seniors with twenty years of experience. Theirs.
A recent study of 2,400 workers in the US, UK and Europe confirms it: 44% of Generation Z workers admit to actively sabotaging AI adoption in their companies. Not out of technological ignorance — they are the most digitally native generation in history — but out of fear of being left out before they have even got in.
The irony is that the same study concludes that those who reject AI are more vulnerable to redundancy than those who adopt it. They are trapped. And they know it.
What we are seeing is not technophobia. It is the logical reaction of a generation that perceives the rules of the game changed without anyone warning them, and that the benefit of that change does not belong to them.
That has a name: a broken social contract.
The question I ask myself is whether anyone in companies is listening to this, or whether we are so busy measuring productivity that we miss the underlying problem.