• by Steven Rosenbaum , Featured Contributor, 6 hours ago

Growing concerns about artificial intelligence have made one question more urgent: Are generations experiencing this technology differently, or are we forcing a simple story onto a far more complicated reality?

That question is at the center of the Sustainable Media Center’s upcoming event, “AI: A Future, a Danger, or Both? An InterGenerational Debate,” on Sept. 23 in New York City. The conversation will bring together two Gen Z and two Gen X+ voices to explore how AI is changing work, creativity, education, trust, relationships, and our sense of the future.

It is not a technical panel, nor is it designed to produce easy agreement. AI is now part of daily life for almost everyone, whether we seek it out or not. It appears in Google searches, workplace software, school assignments, customer service, social feeds, creative tools, and the systems that increasingly make decisions around us. Yet its impact is not distributed evenly, and neither are its benefits or risks.

For me, AI has become deeply complicated. My third book, “The Future of Truth,” used AI as a research tool, a fact I acknowledged in the book itself. But after errors were discovered in its first edition, the book was described by some critics as “written by AI” and became the subject of a sharply worded New York Times article. A fully revised edition, “The Future of Truth: Truth 2.0 Revised,” will be published Oct. 6.

That experience made AI more complicated for me, not less relevant. I am digging further into AI both as a writing tool and as a source of nonfiction hallucinations now appearing in law, academia, and medicine. I do not think we solve this by trying to shut AI down. But we do need to be honest about what it can do, where it fails, and how quickly its errors can become someone else’s reality.

Gen Z grew up with algorithms shaping how they learn, communicate, create, and understand the world. Gen X+ encountered AI after building careers and habits in a largely predigital era. Those starting points may matter. Younger people may be more comfortable adapting to the technology, while older people may be more attuned to what could be lost: human judgment, privacy, jobs, trust, and the friction that sometimes makes us think more carefully.

But that familiar framing is already being challenged by the people taking part.

For Kayleigh Robertson, a mental health advocate and nationally certified peer support specialist, the concern is deeply personal. She sees AI arriving in the lives of young people already shaped by phones, social media, isolation, and a culture of instant answers.

Her sharpest concern is not whether AI will replace jobs. It is who turns to it for help. Robertson works with issues of mental health and digital dependency, and she worries about young people experiencing severe depression, suicidal ideation, or psychosis turning to a chatbot instead of a parent, friend, therapist, or other source of human support.

Robertson connects that fear to the broader GenZ relationship with technology. “Their phone, an extension of their hand, is now a lifeline,” she says. AI may be the latest and most intimate version of that dependence, offering immediate attention, apparent empathy, and an endless supply of answers without asking anything difficult in return.

And yet Robertson is not standing outside the technology. Like most of us, she finds it hard to avoid. What worries her is the effect of constant ease. “What am I doing to my brain when I don’t go the ‘back way’ to find the answer I need, but instead be passively told by AI the response?”

That concern goes beyond mental health. It is about intellectual habits. If information, plans, writing, and recommendations become instantly available, what happens to the patience required to investigate, question, and work through uncertainty? For people who have grown up with social media and the expectation of instant gratification, Robertson wonders whether AI could make that problem more profound.

Dan DeWolf, who chairs the law firm Mintz’s technology practice and co-chairs its venture capital and emerging companies practice, sees the question differently. A lawyer, investor, and teacher of venture capital law at NYU, DeWolf works closely with younger founders, colleagues, and students. He is wary of making generation the central explanation at all.

“I think we may be asking the wrong question,” he says. “Is the divide of use based on generations or by economic class?”

In his own family, DeWolf sees “little distinction of use” between himself and his children, who are in their thirties and successful professionals. He also sees significant overlap between his own views and those of the much younger people he works with. The stronger divide, he suggests, may be between people with different kinds of work and education experience, economic security, and exposure to technology

That is an important complication. A young professional using AI to research, code, or manage a demanding workday may have more in common with an older colleague doing the same than with someone their own age whose experience of the technology is mainly through social feeds, unreliable information, or work that may be vulnerable to automation.

The real story may not be Gen Z versus Gen X. It may be access, work, power, and who gets to decide how these systems enter people’s lives.

Still, the two views meet on what should happen next. DeWolf’s answer is direct: “Legislate and slow down.” He uses AI more because it is “a useful tool,” but adds an important qualification: “not a panacea.”

The conversation will also include Saanvi Arora, a technology policy specialist, youth advocate, and founder of the Youth Power Project. Arora has helped advance more than a dozen youth-led public policies on mental health, healthcare equity, and adolescent rights at the state and federal levels. Her perspective brings policy and youth advocacy into a conversation that can otherwise become abstract very quickly.

Laura Globig, a cognitive neuroscientist and research scientist at NYU, will moderate. Her research combines behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging to examine how AI systems and online platforms shape beliefs, decisions, and behavior. 

Tickets are free but limited.