Why do so many people doubt AI? ...especially young people?
...and why is if often the people that should embrace it the most.
Stanford has been putting out their AI Index report the last few years. They put out the 2025 report a few days ago. There’s a lot in there (more posts coming perhaps), but this graph was the first thing that jumped out at me…
It’s stunning to me that most people in the US and Canada, as well as a lot of Western Europe still seem to believe that AI has brought more drawbacks than benefits - even though the trend is at least in the right direction; but in many countries including India, the belief in AI’s benefits is actually going in the opposite direction!
I still keep coming back a talk I gave last year to a class where a class of technical, young grad students seemed lukewarm about AI, even as I had launched into telling them how I thought it was the most profound change of our lifetimes. Their professor later told me this generation may not see it that way. They saw it as something that they used for homework and then got called out for cheating and that something that seemed to affect the terrible job market they were facing. The points were valid, but left me… like this graph above… a little sad. This generation should be most excited to embrace this technological change, instead they were possibly more angered by the pain it had caused them.
While I believe the benefits of AI for society as a whole will be profound, there’s no doubt they’ll be painful for many in the short-run, and misunderstood by many more. I genuinely hope we can all do more to mitigate the real and perceived pain that this technological change will bring and educate people more about the benefits.
Full report here: https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report