More Evidence Emerges That Gen-Xers Feel the Most ‘Whatever’ About AI

Earlier this month, I noticed that a Pew survey hinted that Gen-X respondents might not be all that excited about AI one way or the other. Pew’s report highlighted a freaked out response among younger people, but my eye was drawn to the relative apathy on display from 50- to 64-year-olds. That survey wasn’t divided into tidy generational cohorts, but a new study from Glassdoor is, and its findings hint at the same trend as Pew: 46.1% of Gen-X workers had nice things to say about AI use in their workplaces, while millennial and Gen-Z workers spoke positively only 38.6% and 32.2% of the time respectively. The Glassdoor study was reported by Bloomberg. As was the case with Pew, whose survey measured feelings of excitement against concern, the Glassdoor findings showed that the majority of sentiment around AI was negative across all cohorts. But with nearly half speaking positively about AI, and the others speaking negatively at much more overwhelming rates, Gen-X seems to be the outlier. Instead of feeling intensely positive or negative, the data suggests they just don’t feel anything intensely about AI. “This fear that we had that the inability or the unwillingness of older workers to adopt new technologies is going to make them obsolete in the workforce just hasn’t been the case with this technology, at least not yet,” Glassdoor senior economist Chris Martin told Bloomberg. Economic analysis from Glassdoor is interesting, but is drawn from a self-selected group: people who leave Glassdoor reviews. Reviews are then picked apart by analysts and churned into data. That’s probably not the world’s most rigorous way to gather information about public opinion, but that doesn’t mean it should be completely dismissed.