Young people are no longer excited about AI

A new Pew Research Center survey shows that for the first time in history, the majority of adults under 30 say they are more worried than excited about AI.

The Arrival of a Landmark Moment

In the summer of 2026, Pew Research Center released a widely discussed survey result: for the first time, more than half (55%) of adults under 30 in the United States stated that they are more worried than excited about artificial intelligence. This figure was only 39% two years ago, and only 31% when Pew first asked this question in 2021.

The significance of this incident goes far beyond the change of a poll figure.

For more than half a century, from personal computers to the Internet, from smartphones to social media, young people have almost invariably stood at the forefront of technological optimism. They are the earliest adopters of new technologies, the most enthusiastic supporters, and the direct beneficiaries of technological dividends. This rule that "young people are naturally close to new technologies" used to be one of the most reliable beliefs in the technology industry. And AI seems to be breaking this rule.

The Transformation Trajectory Behind the Data

Pew's survey data outlines a clear curve. On the indicator of "more worried than excited", the proportion of the 18-29 age group has climbed all the way from 31% in 2021: 29% in 2022, 42% in 2023, 39% in 2024, 47% in 2025, and reached 55% in 2026. At the same time, the proportion of "more excited than worried" has plummeted from 25% five years ago to 11%.

This means that in just five years, the number of young people in the United States who are optimistic about AI has decreased by more than half.

This shift is not an isolated phenomenon. The same survey shows that 52% of all U.S. adults say they are "more worried than excited" about AI, while only 9% say they are "more excited than worried". But the youth group is particularly noteworthy because their attitudes have changed most drastically — the group that once was most optimistic about AI's potential has now become one of the most skeptical groups about this technology.

Unemployment Anxiety: The Core Driving Force of Concerns

What has rapidly cooled young people's enthusiasm for AI? The survey gives a clear answer: concerns about employment prospects.

71% of U.S. adults believe that AI will lead to fewer jobs in the next 20 years, and only 5% believe that AI will create more jobs. Among the group under 30, this proportion is as high as 73%, a significant increase from 61% two years ago.

This anxiety is not groundless. Different from previous waves of automation, AI is precisely impacting those entry-level positions that traditionally help young people enter the labor market — data sorting, copywriting, basic operation, and information retrieval. These jobs used to be "training grounds" for newbies, allowing them to accumulate experience and build professional networks in actual work. Now, AI is taking over these tasks at lower costs and higher efficiency.

Older employees who have already established their careers in the workplace are less negative about AI, which supports the view that AI may be more beneficial to people with rich work experience, while creating structural squeeze for young people who are new to the workplace. U.S. corporate executives are also increasingly openly talking about using AI to automate part of the work and reduce labor costs, and signs of slowdown in entry-level position recruitment have emerged.

More Than Just a Job Security Issue

However, if we only attribute young people's concerns to "fear of losing their jobs", we will underestimate the depth of this attitude shift.

Pew Research Center's survey also reveals that young people's skepticism about AI extends to a broader social level. 48% of adults under 30 believe that AI's impact on society will be negative in the next 20 years, which is the highest proportion among all age groups, far exceeding the 14% who believe AI will bring positive impacts. About 20% of young people believe that AI chatbots will harm their creativity, 61% believe AI will weaken people's creative thinking ability, and 58% believe AI will weaken people's ability to build interpersonal relationships — these indicators also rank first among all age groups.

The picture depicted by these data is: young people are not only worried that AI will take away their jobs, but also concerned about the deep erosion of this technology on human cognitive abilities, social connections and creativity.

It is worth noting that the young people who hold these concerns are precisely the group with the highest usage rate of AI tools. 66% of adults under 30 say they use chatbots, an 11 percentage point increase from two years ago, of which about 20% use them to seek emotional advice, and 27% use them to seek medical advice. The deeper the usage, the heavier the worry — this paradox of "the more you use it, the more afraid you are" reflects the complex and contradictory relationship between the younger generation and AI.

Structural Crisis of Trust in Technology

Young people's concerns also point to a deeper dimension: distrust of the technology stewards. A recent CNBC survey found that most Americans aged 18 to 34 lack trust in the CEOs of AI companies. 76% of respondents do not trust Dario Amodei, the founder of Anthropic, 71% do not trust Meta's Zuckerberg, 70% do not trust Musk, and 69% do not trust OpenAI's Altman.

This distrust of "who will control AI" resonates with the concern of "what consequences AI will bring". When a young person uses ChatGPT to complete assignments every day and uses AI tools to assist work, but is also told that this technology may eliminate their career prospects, and the leaders of the companies promoting this technology are not trustworthy — it is almost a rational reaction that worry outweighs excitement.

A discussion sparked by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, on social media may be the most representative. He admitted that part of the reason why the public hates AI is that technology leaders have not delivered the main benefits they promised, and the advice he gave is: "The thing that will actually work is curing cancer." This sentence itself is like a mirror, reflecting how deep the public trust deficit in the technology industry is.

The "Rational Caution" of Chinese Young People

Across the ocean, Chinese young people's attitudes towards AI show similar but not identical characteristics.

A survey released by consulting firm PCG Lab this year covering 1,000 respondents born between 1997 and 2009 across the country shows that more than 90% of Chinese young people have formed stable AI usage habits, and 45.8% use it frequently every day. However, in terms of anxiety about technological substitution, Chinese young people are more restrained: only 5.7% feel "very worried", and 54.9% believe that "opportunities and risks coexist".

A survey by China Youth Daily revealed another layer of concern — 71.7% of respondents worry that over-reliance on AI will lead to thinking inertia and the degradation of independent thinking ability. Especially the group born after 2000, who have the highest usage frequency, also have the deepest concerns.

The pressure on the employment front is equally real. The number of college graduates in 2026 reaches 12.7 million, hitting a new high for the 11th consecutive year. Together with previous unemployed graduates and returning overseas returnees, the total number of job seekers exceeds 15 million throughout the year. Some graduates are facing job hunting difficulties: large companies are laying off employees on a large scale, and AI is replacing a large number of basic work for interns. Australian National University Associate Professor of Economics Shen Kailing pointed out that a key difference between AI and previous technological progress is that it has the greatest impact on the first one to three years of experience accumulation stage of young people who have just entered the workplace.

However, Chinese young people tend to take the initiative to adjust rather than worry passively. A survey of 1,333 fresh graduates by China Youth Daily shows that 91.1% of respondents have taken the initiative to adjust their job search direction due to AI, looking for integration points related to AI. The report of PwC also points out that the mainland China job market presents the feature of "skill transformation rather than job substitution", and occupations that are highly affected by AI are absorbing new skills at a faster speed.

This difference may stem from multiple factors: China's AI applications are more concentrated on the industrial side rather than the consumer side, the government's guidance on technology application scenarios, and the emphasis on "adapting to changes" in social culture, all of which may affect the way young people express their attitudes. However, the structural challenges faced by young people in both countries — entry-level positions being squeezed by AI and increasing uncertainty in career development paths — are essentially the same.

A Footnote to an Era

The shift in American young people's attitudes towards AI from excitement to worry may mark a new stage in the relationship between technology and society. In the past, the popularization of new technologies often followed the model of "embrace first, reflect later" — people enjoy the convenience first, and then gradually realize the cost. The unique feature of AI is that its impact comes too fast, too direct, and too all-encompassing, so that reflection occurs almost simultaneously with embrace.

When a technology is at the same time a tool, a competitor, a creator, and a decision-maker, young people's complex feelings towards it — dependent yet vigilant, using yet skeptical — may not be a manifestation of irrationality, but a reasonable response to the rapid expansion of technological power. As one respondent implied: the problem is not what AI can do, but who decides what it does, and who will pay the price for it.

The answer to this question will not only affect the career destiny of a generation, but also shape the future form of the trust relationship between technology and society.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Edu Guide" (ID: EduZhiNan), author: Edu Guide, published with authorization from 36Kr.