Would you believe me if I said the young really, really, really, don’t trust tech CEOs? Well get ready to pick your jaw up off the floor, because a new study from CNBC and the Generation Lab says it’s true.
In recent years, CNBC has worked a lot with this guy named Cyrus Beschloss who co-founded the Generation Lab (It’s a DC research company). CNBC hosts will sometimes have Beschloss on as a talking head, and his job, as a fun little interruption of the regular CNBC program, will be to explain what in the world the youngs think about all this, and he’ll say what we all know: The youngs hate all this! A lot!
Here’s Beschloss communicating this a year ago:
And a few days ago, CNBC and the Generation Lab did it again. They released a new study of 18- 34-year-olds, and, well:
When given the names of nine key people in the AI industry and asked whether they trust each leader to act responsibly on AI, in each case a majority of respondents said they don’t.
By the numbers:
- Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella: about 65% distrusted
- Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg: about 70% distrusted
- Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang: about 70% distrusted
- SpaceX CEO Elon Musk: about 70% distrusted
- Alphabet/Google CEO Sundar Pichai: about 75% distrusted
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei: about 75% distrusted
- OpenAI CEO Sam Altman: about 75% distrusted
- Palantir Chairman Peter Thiel (and former CEO of PayPal): about 79% distrusted
- Palantir CEO Alex Karp: about 81% distrusted
And while we’re on the subject, 45% of respondents think AI’s impact on their careers will be negative, while only 10% believe its impact will be positive.
There are more shocking findings from the Generation Lab’s survey. Nearly 80% expressed negative sentiment about the U.S. economy. 50% said that in the future, the economy “will get worse,” while 22% thought it “will get better.” Meanwhile, 46% hold a “favorable” or a “very favorable” view of democratic socialism, as opposed to 23% who have a “somewhat unfavorable” or “very unfavorable” view.