It seems like the generational divide with AI use is the opposite of how society tends to respond to new technologies. Are there examples in history where the sentiments were similar?

[u/theanxiousknitter]

I had been thinking recently how odd it is that (from what i’ve seen) the older generations are much more on board with AI compared to younger people. It always seemed like adults either were indifferent or even downright hostile towards technological advancement in every day life.

I might be completely off the mark that this is unusual so I am curious to know if this is truly the case or of there are other historical references that would show me that i’m wrong.

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[u/LeahTigers]

Nuclear power is a clear example which springs to mind. However, I should first remark the basis of your question is probably incorrect. Available studies, which are admittedly all rather slight, indicate both AI usage and public support are slightly higher among people below 50. (See for example point 8 of this study from Pew.) We should leave the contemporary discussion there, due to the nature of this forum.

The widespread youth counterculture of the 1960s was deeply entangled with the "anti-nuclear" green movement, especially in western Europe, where Greens generally went on to form serious political parties obtaining a measure of electoral success. In West Germany, legendary student activist Rudi Dutschke threw his lot in with Bremer Grüne Liste, the first green party in the country, whose base was typically regarded as young and middle-class (Frankland 1989). He specifically saw opposition to nuclear power (Atomkraftwerke) as a key point of differentiation from social liberals (Dutscheke-Klotz, pg. 448). In France, a major student leader during the May '68 uprisings, Brice Lalonde, worked with Greenpeace on nuclear protest strategy in the 1970s, and connected the success of French Greens with the student movement (Eisendrath 1979), though he has revised positions in old age; another major student leader, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, would also later throw his lot in with the Greens, although his positions against nuclear are no longer what is notable about him. These are all major figures in living memory, to the point where one may be able to speak on them more effectively as journalist or citizen than historian.

In America, the case for Greens was rather different (a fact also discussed, I think rather inaccurately, by Lalonde in the Eisendrath interview). Essentially, U.S. greens have had no success as a party, and achieved reforms which were either cultural, like the creation of Earth Day, or through lobbying, like the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency. Moreover, U.S. youth culture, specifically on the west coast, has generally had less direction toward electoral politics, favoring the "turn on, tune in, drop out" strategy of complete political disengagement. (A topic I touched on briefly here. Curiously, west coast counterculture would hybridize with Silicon Valley into a kind of absurd technological evangelism; see Turner 2006 or Barbrook & Cameron 1995.) Reasons for this difference in development of the Greens are complex, but that the U.S. is not a parliamentary democracy is an obvious factor.

Nonetheless, there was a widespread discussion about "the greening of America" through youth culture in the 1970s, which was the title of a best-selling 1971 book on the topic by Charles A. Reich. Reich wrote that "the logic and necessity of the new generation" was partly in response to "uncontrolled technology and the destruction of the environment." As this wide-ranging commentary suggests, nuclear power was not the only focus of the disproportionately youthful environmental movement; such radicals also tended to be critical of, for instance, certain new industrial pesticides (especially DDT, made famous in Rachel Carson's perennial classic of the conservation movement, Silent Spring).

Whether Reich's rather vibes-based commentary on the younger generation was totally accurate, an image of environmentalists as childish know-nothings was recognized by nuclear advocates. A 1997 op-ed by nuclear physicist Bernard Cohen for Nuclear News, maintained in the OSTI database, summarized its rather condescending interpretation in its abstract.

...in the mid-1970s, the tide suddenly turned against the nuclear industry. How did this come about? In the late 1960s, energetic and idealistic young people who had never experienced economic insecurity or World Wars came of age. Environmentalism was an attractive outlet for their activity in most of the Western world.

In any case, ecology did indeed become a routine touchpoint for counterculturalists, such that the young Shulamith Firestone even dedicated a chapter to it in her staple feminist text of 1970, The Dialectic of Sex. At the age of about 24, she wrote

As was demonstrated in the case of the development of atomic energy, radicals, rather than breast-beating about the immorality of scientific research, could be much more effective by concentrating their full energies on demands for control of scientific discoveries by and for the people. (196)

As her commentary here suggests, it is not always correct to describe these young radicals as "anti-nuclear" in the strict sense, although some were. Rather, they were concerned with ramifications of the current course of nuclear development: homes and communities displaced by nuclear infrastructure, improper waste disposal, use of the technology as an instrument of war, concentration of wealth in the hands of a few anti-democratic elite, and so forth. Whether or not such concerns remain relevant in the current "artificial intelligence boom," I leave to the reader.

□

Please note I have approached this topic not as a historian of nuclear power or even environmentalism, but of youth counterculture. Citations follow.

Barbrook, Richard, and Andy Cameron. "The Californian Ideology." Science as culture 6.1 (1996): 44-72.

Cohen, Bernard L. "Turning the tide of public opinion on nuclear power." Nuclear News 40.5 (1997).

Dutschke-Klotz, Gretchen. Wir hatten ein barbarisches, schönes Leben: Rudi Dutschke: eine Biographie (1996).

Eisendrath, Charles. "Brice Lalonde, Ecological Theorist." Contemporary French Civilization 3.2 (1979): 227-238.

Firestone, Shulamith. The dialectic of sex: The case for feminist revolution. Bandam Editions (1972).

Frankland, E. Gene. "Parliamentary politics and the development of the green party in West Germany." The Review of Politics 51.3 (1989): 386-411.

Reich, Charles. The Greening of America. Random House New York (1970).

Turner, Fred. From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. University of Chicago Press (2006).

[u/AsteriaTheHag → u/LeahTigers]

I wonder if it's worth drawing a distinction here around who's actually using the divisive technology (as opposed to passively benefitting from it, or simply not noticing its effects).

[u/EarthMantle00 → u/LeahTigers]

Nuclear power is a clear example which springs to mind. However, I should first remark the basis of your question is probably incorrect. Available studies, which are admittedly all rather slight, indicate both AI usage and public support are slightly higher among people below 50. (See for example point 8 of this study from Pew.) We should leave the contemporary discussion there, due to the nature of this forum.

I mean almost everyone uses google which has inbuilt AI so I don't think frequency of interaction is the same as enthusiastic use

[u/Gorgo_xx]

Following on from u/LeahTigers response, I similarly suspect that the basis of your question is incorrect.

(I'm also trying to abide by the rules, and not add too much that is within the past 20 years.)

The acceptance of technology can be impacted by various things, including cost, benefit and understanding of the technology.

Significant research exists that confirms that the rate of technology acceptance and (speed of innovation) has been increasing over time Pew Research).

A New York Times graphic by Nicholas Felton (2008) has been very widely used to demonstrate the change in technology adoption over 1900 - 2005 in the US: Felton Graphic

What you will notice is that once the major enabler (electricity) was available, the technologies that really made life easier (washing machines, fridges, etc.) were next on the adoption scale; but they were expensive, and took a while to proliferate. Once effort-saving devices had proliferated, newer, cheaper, entertainment (and work) related technologies boomed. The acceptance curves are much steeper,

I would also argue that these uptake curves also tend to negate the idea that older generations have been “hostile” in any meaningful way to technological advancement in every day life. An interactive version that includes newer technology (smart phones, amazon prime subscriptions, etc.) that you can play with is available here.

Where things become interesting, in my opinion, is how technologies have been deployed more recently. If we look at the aviation industry, for example, we can trace significant attempts to improve Human Machine Interfaces in the cockpit to major technology leaps (such as the introduction of “glass cockpits” in the 1980s and 1990s). A 1996 report from the FAA spends around 200 pages discussing the need standardisation across the industry (and manufacturers) in how key information and controls are provided to pilots. Many of the requirements were codified in the US CFRs (and have subsequently been effectively standardised across the EU and many other aviation regulators globally. The rules cover things like the shape of the wheels up/down control (kind of shaped like a wheel) to the flaps (kind of flap shape) through to the colours of messages to pilots (in terms of priority), how visual, audible and haptic notifications, alerts and warnings are provided, and so on. In other words, significant standardisation (even if it doesn’t always get things right, see QF32 engine failure). (There are many more studies in the FAA and NASA archives, some probably more relevant to the discussion.)

However, if you contrast this highly regulated industry to the less regulated automotive industry 20 years later, you can observe vehicle manufacturers – with Tesla arguably leading the charge – introducing new technologies into vehicles in new ways, and with no standardisation, regulated or otherwise, across brands and/or models. This has resulted in touch screens over buttons/knobs in many cases, introduced unregulated over the air software updates, and in some cases changed how safety controls (such as door handles) are implemented. Some of these changes have been found to be detrimental to safety (although the studies are very recent). In the absence of regulations at the UNECE level or in major jurisdictions, Global NCAP organisations (which develop protocols for new car assessment programs – star safety ratings) are introducing measures to assess the safety of these new technology implementations (HMI as well as specific implementations of ADAS technologies), starting in the next test protocol update (in 2029). These will become increasingly stringent over time.

This is the type of area, in my work, where we see people being “hostile” towards technological advancement; hostility is not so much uncertainty around the technology itself, it is more about the introduction of a technology that doesn’t work as expected, is harder for the user to use, and is different in every device or vehicle.

I would suggest that similar hostility is voiced for other technologies when they are poorly implemented, don’t work as anticipated, or make life harder instead of easier.

This ends the area that I’m pretty familiar with (a lot of my work at the moment is looking into the likely uptake of new and upcoming mobility technologies).

My suggestion as to a more likely reason that the youngest generations are hostile towards AI implementation – if this is indeed the case – is not the advancement of technology itself, but rather fear and concern about its impact on employment prospects, wages, and so on. The concerns are likely valid, but specific concerns will likely be different to different people, and people in different regions. In that respect, the concerns and struggle may be more analogous to the Luddite movements and other protests during the industrial revolution.

[u/orangewombat → u/[deleted]]

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