Millennials are best placed to navigate the AI era
As Lewis Liu turns 40, he reflects on how the generation that grew up before social media will navigate the ethical challenges of AI
I’m writing this column on the steps of Widener Library at Harvard, exactly where I sat solving some physics problem set as a college kid two decades ago, currently en route to London to celebrate my 40th birthday via Boston for a financial derivatives conference. A lot has changed for us millennials in the last 20 years. But our vantage point has never been more valuable.
We millennials occupy a uniquely peculiar position. We grew up in the pre-digital world, listening to music on cassette tapes, playing outside until it was too dark to see, socialising in the sandpit rather than on a screen, far less algorithmically programmed than Gen Z. And yet we came of age precisely when the internet did. I was one of the first users of Facebook at Harvard, watching the digital world being built in real time.
And now comes AI. We are entering proper adulthood, assuming real influence and power, at the precise moment the age of AI is being born. Here’s the thing: we are still young enough to adapt our careers around it. And because of our in-betweenness, one foot in the physical world, one foot in the digital, we are uniquely positioned not just to benefit from this revolution, but to be a source of genuine positive influence.
AI for The Real World
We are the perfect generation to apply AI to the real world, and here is why: we are the only generation that has both mastered the digital world and the old physical economy.
We grew up with an innate understanding of physical reality: owning physical CDs, navigating without Google Maps (a friend’s child recently looked at a paper map and called it “paper GPS”), working as waiters with zero digital infrastructure. That upbringing gave us something Gen Z largely lacks: a deep, intuitive appreciation for the human element of decision-making and the physical constraints of the real world.
We also spent years acting as translators between our Gen X bosses and Boomer parents on one side, and the digital realm on the other. Does Gen Z do that for us? No, because we are already fluent in both languages. That bilingualism is a superpower that is only now coming into its own.
If this AI revolution is going to reach beyond Silicon Valley and into the real economy, it will be because millennials have the capability to translate the power of the modern AI tech stack into operations, communications and decisions that the rest of the world can actually adopt and understand. No other generation can do that as naturally as we can.
Digital Detox
It is a sobering statistic that millennials appear to represent peak cognitive performance in all human history, with Gen Z showing measurably lower levels of both cognitive capability and conscientiousness than their parents. The evidence is mounting that growing up digitally native, immersed in social media, tablets, and smartphones from birth, has genuinely hampered the cognitive development of an entire generation. The Gen Z backlash against technology is itself a symptom of this.
We millennials have a distinct advantage of timing here. We learned to be digital young enough to master it, but old enough to remember what it means to be fully human without it. That purely human experience, free of screens, is something we are desperately trying to pass on to our Generation Alpha children. It is our duty as the in-between generation to reignite in-person human connection and a relationship with the physical world for the generations that follow.
We also have something no other generation can offer our children: lived memory of what it actually felt like. That 90s feeling of playing outside until the street lights came on. The last generation to navigate adolescent romance without an app. We know that feeling viscerally, and we know precisely what our children stand to gain if we can impart it.
A New Kind of Politics
Our path has not been straightforward. Many of us graduated straight into the worst financial crisis in living memory. Then, just as we found our footing, started families, and began building something, the pandemic hit, catching us precisely at the moment of young children and aging parents simultaneously. In response to both, governments printed unprecedented amounts of money, generating inflation and wealth inequality unseen in previous generations. At my 15th Harvard reunion a few years ago, the same observation kept surfacing: “I don’t get it. I just made managing director, I’m in the top one per cent of earners, and I still cannot afford the house I grew up in.” No image captures this generational resentment better than the New York Times running a picture of a rotting avocado to describe our predicament.
And yet, precisely because we have watched democracy being hollowed out by social media in real time, we are not brainwashed into accepting the bro-ligarchy. We have seen it all in the first half of our lifetimes: the extraordinary individual success (deserving or not) of some of our American contemporaries like Zuckerberg, Vance and Altman; the collective lifting of hundreds of millions out of poverty in China, and the slow, sad decline of a kinder, more humane Europe. We have watched an older generation of populist, destructive forces trade our prosperity, and our children’s, for illusions propagated by social media’s darker tendencies.
It is precisely because we stand on this precipice, because we genuinely fear that our children will not live better lives than our own, that we understand the full weight of what is needed. We have seen enough to know that the existing political and economic system is not working for us. And we have enough perspective, and enough time, to demand something better: a politics that is more nuanced, more humane, and built from the best of what we have witnessed rather than the worst.
As I turn 40, sitting on these library steps where I first started figuring out who I was and what I believed, I find myself unexpectedly optimistic but not naively so. It’s the kind of optimism that comes from having seen enough to know what is broken and still believing it can be fixed.
We are the in-between generation
We are the in-between generation. We remember the world before the algorithm, and we are building the world after it. We have watched democracy fray, inequality deepen, and an entire generation of children handed screens instead of childhoods. But we also have something no generation before us has had in quite this combination: the technical fluency to understand what AI actually is, the human grounding to know what it should be for, and the parental urgency to care deeply about what kind of world it builds.
That is not a small thing. That is, in fact, everything.
So as I head to London to mark four decades on this earth, here is my birthday resolution: to use whatever influence, platform, and energy I have to ensure that this AI revolution works for people, not just for a handful of billionaires in California. To build AI that amplifies human dignity rather than replacing it. And to raise children who know what it feels like to play outside until the street lights come on.
Fellow millennials: we are not too old and we are not too young. We are exactly on time.