The study found that young people were growing less hopeful and more angry about the technology, even though around half of the demographic was using AI either daily or weekly.

“Even though”? I would argue “because of”. They’ve used AI enough to know that it’s inconsistent and unable to actually do their jobs, but it’s either being used to justify layoffs or as a cudgel to push you for unrealistic increases in productivity. Maybe the AI will one-shot a prompt and save you a bunch of time or maybe you’ll spend three times as long rewriting prompts in the hopes that the next time will do the trick. 

Moreover, people like me explicitly avoided management as a career path. I wanted to do the work that got me into the field to begin with, not manage a bunch of people to do it for me. Now everyone is a middle manager, just of the world’s most frustratingly inconsistent employee who never learns and doesn’t respond to anything other than you asking again but in a slightly different way. 

For everyone except C-suite executives and shareholders, this is a fucking nightmare. The Jetson’s envisioned a future where productivity gains increased so much that an employee worked two, one-hour days a week, doing nothing more than pushing a button. Instead we have people working ridiculously longer hours to clean up AI slop, and burning out in the process, leading to being laid off or outright fired, meaning your income drops to zero.