“What we find is deep ambivalence on how Gen Z is thinking using AI,” Benjamin Lira Luttges, a postdoctoral scholar at Wharton who led research on the report, told Fortune.
Though they require some decoding, Gen Z’s tangled attitudes toward AI can be critical in designing a path forward for the technology, more broadly, to be best integrated into the workplace, Lira Luttges suggested.
“Young people lead the adoption of new technologies, and a lot of things that are often seen as fringe, as not mainstream, are adopted by young people and eventually become part of the mainstream,” he said. “So in a sense…looking at Gen Z is a way of looking towards the future of work.”
“There’s a legitimate trade off between benefits and costs that you get from using AI,” he said. “Our brains are wired to prefer smaller, immediate rewards versus long-term, delayed rewards.”
As Gen Z grapples with finding or keeping jobs, as well as scaling their career ladders, job performance bolstered by an AI boost may hold more appeal than the less tangible threat of critical thinking skills loss. Similarly, even if an employer does not want an employee using AI on certain work tasks, that workers, particularly if young, would consider getting their tasks done efficiently as more important than disobeying their boss, particularly if the risk of getting caught is slow, Lira Luttges noted.
To maximize how AI is used in the workplace, employers should not ban AI, but rather embrace ambivalence toward it, the report authors argued. According to the survey, respondents who reported using AI more frequently worried less about its impact on intelligence and motivation, indicating AI anxiety may resolve over time.
“The biggest risk organizations face is just being stagnant,” he said.
But as long as workplaces are intentional about how they implement AI, Lira Luttges said the technology won’t cause a significant impact on critical thinking.
“For every task, there are two kinds of efforts,” Lira Luttges said. “There is effort that is germane to the task, that is intrinsic to the thing that you’re doing, and that that kind of effort is the effort that you put in, and gets translated into learning. But there’s a lot of effort that is just there, that’s just like friction, that doesn’t really teach you anything.”
“You should outsource the crap, not the craft,” he added.
