Our New AI-Native Generation

For as long as we humans can remember, we’ve been obsessed with the concept of youth.

Young people are typically faster, stronger, more agile, and more adaptable than their more elderly associates. The fountain of youth was the holy grail of early explorers, and many of us still chase the idea of eternal youth and beauty.

However, in the world of vocation and technology, youth was always seen as a disadvantage - until today.

There’s a new generation of AI-native people – those who grew up coexisting with the technologies that we see rivaling us in terms of work and nearly everything else.

What will this AI-native generation be like? Presumably, they will be more capable in terms of technology literacy, and more adaptable to the reality that we’re going to be coexisting with intelligent machines.

Youth Surveys

In some surveys of youth, you can get some numbers about how young people feel about AI.

For example, in this report from the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology titled A Future with AI: Voices of Global Youth Report Launched, authors reveal that two thirds of the AI-native generation trust AI, with 93% favorable about its impact. That, presumably, is not the kind of sentiment that you would get from a room full of Gen-Xers.

And then there’s this from UNICEF, where a research team asked a third of a million (roughly 330,000) young people about AI, and got some mixed results, with many admitting their unfamiliarity with the tech.

On the whole, though, we see quite exuberant responses from many young people who have a positive outlook on the future.

Rapid Innovation and the AI-Native Crowd

Here’s more from an interview that I did with Forbes editor Randall Lane starting out the Imagination in Action event this April.

We were talking about Forbes’s 30 under 30 initiative, and how the magazine stays relevant in a quickly changing world.

“You see a lot of nascent startups, and you see disruptive startups and native-AI companies going from zero to multi-billion(s), and that's great, but … you see every organization saying, ‘how do we integrate AI and change what we do?’ So we learned. The good part was we eventually figured out you have to stitch these things back together. And Forbes was very successful early, and remains very successful in terms of making the Internet part of the DNA.”

Comparing today’s advances to the printing press, he said one of the differences is that now, we realize what we’re doing.

“It's just so amazing to realize that we're in this moment, and that we all realize we're in that moment,” Lane said. “Here we are, right now. It's happening so fast, and we know it's happening. We know it's big, and we recognize it in the moment. That's nuts.”

From the Old Days

As I talked with my friend about how older folks feel, I was reminded of the times when computers were set apart, first with mainframes, and then with the personal computer, which was so new and foreign that it occupied its own space as a household appliance. For sure, we weren’t carrying them everywhere in our pockets.

As I pointed out during the conversation, in our schools, the computer room was separate. The PCs were not yet integrated into the general curriculum. It sounds strange, now, and will forever be weird to the AI-native generation.

More on Forbes 30 Under 30 and Youth

Forbes 30 under 30, Lane explained, was initiated 14 years ago, and was, in his words, “a monster right out of the gate.” Indeed, looking at the numbers, the program, which celebrates young entrepreneurs, is Forbes’ most profitable list, with robust sponsorship.

“It was the right time,” he said. “Youth is valuable now.”

Comparing this age to the days when young people had to apprentice for trades, building knowledge and resources slowly, he painted a picture of a new world where someone can drop out of school, start their own business, and be well off by 30.

Here’s more of what Lane recommended for business: building brands. Using the right tools, and over all, being transparent.

“Change is coming,” he said, stressing the need for innovators to tell an audience about when they are using AI, and when they’re not.

It was a good conversation, and it goes back to that contrast – between traditional business models, and what we’re encountering now. We have never in human history had to co-exist with another set of entities that have the cognitive tools AIs are endowed with. We have to change with the times.

So in some ways, this is an appeal to youth – that we have to learn from a younger generation empowered to accept the realities that we live with. It implies some humility on the part of older folks who may feel like the change is coming too quickly. But like Bob Dylan famously said: “get out of the new road if you can’t lend a hand, cause the times they’re rapidly changing.”