How to Deal With “AI Grief.”
By Suzy Welch
Isn’t it fun to go out with friends to a buzzy bar in the coolest part of town, order some drinks and pizza, and end up talking about . . . ChatGPT? Or, more precisely, about how artificial intelligence is going to make everything faster and easier but also destroy all that we hold dear? Yes, I love doing that too. I did it the other night. Good times.
A new era is upon us. The quiet mourning for the death of a world we were barely holding on to by our fingernails anyway.
I’m not talking about AI only with other oldsters, by the way, who only recently figured out how to share documents on Zoom and have made peace with the prospect of never talking to their children with a phone against their ear again. The angst is generational. Many of my Gen Z students at New York University’s Stern School of Business tell me they are in an angsty love-hate relationship with AI. It does their homework but leaves them wondering if their expensively educated brains are special after all. It plans their trips to Europe after graduation, but it also is creating an economy that makes their future employers so nervous that job start dates are being delayed. Their professors—myself included—encourage them to be excited about the opportunities AI will bring someday. Except that the time between now and “someday” feels like a yawning chasm of chaos and uncertainty. It reminds them, they confess, of the pandemic all over again. Even if you generally find yourself annoyed with the Zoomers, you have to admit they are on to something here.
Read the full The Wall Street Journal article.
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Suzy Welch is a Professor at NYU Stern.