OK, Zoomer: You're the First Human Surplus Generation

“Describe one challenge you faced and how you surmounted it.” This inquiry, which seems a reasonable enough job-interview question, doesn’t come from a person who has history in Ben’s area, or from an HR professional. In fact, it isn’t delivered by a person at all. Ben is likely being scored by an AI assessment tool. In more than one interview, he receives a prompt, mere seconds to think of an answer and a minute or so to speak—or, as he put it, “to fill up the space”—while recording himself.

After a number of these anxious algo-exchanges, Ben gets to make his case to actual humans, albeit virtually. He has only one interview in person. He goes on to land a job with a financial firm, but he’s still bothered by the automated interactions and how they determined his fate. He found it uncanny, he said, to “speak to a machine” in virtual rooms, with “no body language to go on.” His friends have passed through similar machine gauntlets in their job searches. “Many feel alienated by it, and rightfully so,” said Ben. “It can seem like we as a society now want people to act like computers.”

For Generation Z, born between 1997 and 2012, digital arbiters are evaluating their worth all day, looming over their studies and jobs, and threatening to sculpt them into something machinelike. And while it promises to make them faster and more efficient, AI may be denying them the kinds of experiences they need to fully thrive as workers—and as humans.

Whether they’re searching for work, trying to hold onto a job as AI changes it, or still in school, Gen Z is facing what we call “anticipatory obsolescence”—the Black Mirror–ish possibility that they may be launching themselves into a future where they are no longer quite necessary, or, at best, are subordinated to an algorithmic authority. “What’s going to happen to a whole generation?” asked Ben.

Three Responses

For months, we’ve spoken to dozens of Gen Zers and identified three overlapping ways they’re responding to the rise of AI. Most are what we call AI Adaptors. They’re using large language models, but selectively, and often more because they have to than because they want to. Many are trying on the technology without really trusting where it’s going. ChatGPT to research a company? OK. Claude for brainstorming? Maybe. Gemini telling them what to do with their lives? No thanks. While they might want to take what makes them faster and more efficient, they balk at surrendering their own thinking and creativity. Their question: How can I use it without it using me?

Like Ben, many are preparing for or working in jobs highly exposed to AI, which includes not only areas like finance or software engineering, but some you might not think of, like nursing, or, ironically, human resources. How, Gen Zers would like somebody to explain, are they supposed to get good at something if AI is there interfering with paths on which beginners learn? What if relying on it is taking away their capacity to learn in the first place? Accordingly, many are trying to “AI proof” themselves by amassing skills that can’t be automated or aiming toward work where human judgment or presence is still required. Others go further, envisioning careers where they hope to master AI or make it safer and more accountable.

As veteran technology theorist and professor Ethan Zuckerman put it, describing most of his college students: “They really don’t think it’s good for society. AI has been thrust upon them, and they don’t know how to cope with the changes—will there be jobs anymore?”

The second group of Gen Zers we’ve talked to, which we call AI Reformers, have decided to funnel their frustration into the fight about what the technology will become and who gets to decide. They’re already engaged with the rules and rollouts of new technology—organizing politically, lobbying or getting into campaigns. They’re people like Nickolas Spiliotopoulos, 22, a recent graduate of the University of California, Santa Barbara, who led his campus’s chapter of PauseAI US, a nonprofit that advocates for halting frontier AI development. Like many young Reformers, he sees himself as more pragmatic than ideological. As someone who studied political science, he speaks with both-sides diplomacy: “I want to be part of the movement that is regulating AI but also to find a middle ground.”

He and other Reformers often work through local chapters of groups pressing lawmakers to rein in large language models and to put AI companies on a tighter chain. Others are fighting to protect humans from displacement or demanding greater transparency and accountability around bossware and surveillance, or pushing back on the data centers proliferating like mushrooms around the country. They want to put the public back at the center of a conversation currently dominated by Silicon Valley oligarchs and their machines.

Other examples of protesters include people like Nathan Kim, a Ph.D. student in his mid-twenties at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, who has been organizing a coalition against his university’s plans to create a computing facility in collaboration with the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He and others like him, from places ranging from Tennessee to New Jersey, have been banding together against massive AI infrastructure projects. These include groups like the Climate Revolution Action Network in New Jersey, which pushed successfully to cancel a planned data center in New Brunswick and is fighting against a roughly 400,000-square-foot proposed CoreWeave facility in Kenilworth.

Finally, there is the least tamed group, the AI Refuseniks. Among them are the pranksters and tricksters actively resisting the AI-ification of everyday life. They include people like the Luddite thinker Damian Thomas, 25, a web developer in Astoria, Queens, who runs the Refusenik platform Unplatform. Its cohort also contains young artists ditching generative tools, along with journalists and other knowledge workers sometimes choosing notebooks over laptops, analog workflows over Google Calendars, and human-centered spaces both online and off. The Refuseniks are deliberately embracing the messy friction AI promises to erase—writing by hand, doing things the traditional way, and making room for slowness and imperfection.

Refuseniks don’t want to optimize away these essential parts of being human, but to throw a protective force field around them.

A Redundant Generation?

Over the summer, a significant chunk of new job seekers were interviewed through AI-fueled hiring practices, often followed by chilly automated rejections. In the spring, a survey by hiring platform Greenhouse found that over 60 percent of job seekers had encountered an AI interview. Among the companies making these tools is Hirevue, whose prerecorded video interview platform is a favorite of employers. Users on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell have described the one-sided auditions, facilitated by Hirevue and similar companies, as “the most humiliating recruiting experience ive had” and “extremely uncomfortable,” with one weary poster offering a deadpan suggestion to use “a sock puppet or action figure/Barbie in place of you.”

For Gen Zers, job hunting can feel like a game rigged to waste their time, where the prize is a spectral illusion. One survey found that 81 percent of recruiters admit their companies post “ghost jobs”—positions not intended to be filled, but used to signal growth, harvest applicant data, or, even worse, keep current employees on edge. A few defiant Zoomers—a nickname that stuck after they were forced onto the platform during the pandemic—are ghosting back, but employers hold the cards, and some are refusing to hire this generation at all.

The old promise of entry-level work, where you find a position, learn the ropes, and make your way up, was already fading. Gen Xers and millennials can tell you that. But AI is quickening the unraveling, disrupting how young people find jobs—if they find jobs—and also what they confront when they get there. Gen Z is squinting into a fog, unsure of what’s coming, yet certain that disembodied decision-makers will have a say in it.

Technology podcaster and critic Edward Ongweso Jr., who co-hosts This Machine Kills, reminds us that young people have always discovered they have little power over their jobs. But AI, he said, is making the power imbalance harder to ignore, because now “your boss is structuring your workplace in the hopes of replacing you.”

“And we’re the grunt-force out there being asked to build the AI infrastructure,” one Gen Zer told us. “Kind of unsettling.”

Deloitte’s global 2026 Gen Z and Millennial Survey shows these pressures already impacting how young people work and plan. Nearly three-quarters are already using AI in their work, but almost a third say their organizations aren’t prepared for the changes it will bring, and another third say the AI tools they’re handed aren’t really up to the job. It seems that they’re having to work alongside machines while the parameters of what they’ll be needed for, and how much that work will even be worth, grow ever more obscure. More than half are putting off major life decisions because of financial worries. They’re hit hardest of any generation by rising housing costs, and as far as having kids? Too expensive.

All of these groups are confronted with an economy they can’t afford, a president they don’t approve of, and a political system they trust about as much as a corporate chatbot. In a poll by Axios-Generation Lab, depressively characterized as “Thumbs down on everything,” more than a quarter of 18- to 34-year-olds said they believed they, or someone they know, has already lost a job to AI, and over three-quarters say finding a job themselves would be somewhat or very difficult. The actual AI job apocalypse hasn’t arrived—yet. But the damage to Gen Z is already showing up in who is getting hired: A recent United States Census Bureau study found that employment among 22- to 24-year-olds dropped 12 percent in the most AI-exposed industries over the 10 quarters following ChatGPT’s arrival.

Ongweso noted that companies are certainly acting as if a big transformation is already underway, and even if it doesn’t happen as expected, that doesn’t change the grim reality for people who didn’t get hired or found themselves pushed into careers they didn’t want because of it. Did any young person ever say to herself, Hey, I’d like to spend all day babysitting AI agents! Probably not. And yet often, that’s where the new jobs are.

With all that to contend with, as well as layoffs, punishing inflation that snuffs out any wage gains, high interest rates, and the sky-high cost of just being an adult, it can all feel like Gen Z is being thrust into an epoch that author and AI critic Cory Doctorow calls the “Enshittocene.”

Gen Z favorite Phoebe Bridgers sings of the fatalism young people feel as everything real seems to be receding: “The billboard said, THE END IS NEAR, / I turned around; there was nothing there / Yeah, I guess the end is here.”

Adaptation Nation

On a June evening in Midtown Manhattan, a packed room of Adaptors gathers for “AI and the Future of Society,” a conversation hosted by the Aspen Institute’s Samuel Kimbriel with Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark. The vibe is “existential cocktail party.” On stage, the two men volley questions about what makes an ideal society.

During the Q&A, Nina Bodow takes the mic. What is the most sacred human capacity, she asks, that young people should protect from AI? Suddenly, things feel a lot less abstract. Clark’s smooth answer is to guard your attention fiercely. But, of course, AI is extraordinarily good at monopolizing just that: It’s instant, personalized, and much more emotionally validating than your roommate. In short, addictive.

Bodow, now a Yale University junior, doesn’t reject AI. She uses it every day for voice-to-text, organizing notes, and some other time-saving