To the young person who's really worried about AI

Remaining open to people and the power of luck in unlucky times.

“Mother and Mary,” Edmund Charles Tarbell, 1922. (National Gallery of Art)

In life it is better to be lucky than good, they say. (Though once you get old, you may wonder whether it’s better to be young than lucky. That is a subject for another newsletter.)

Today we address the young and unlucky.

This graduation season you stand at the doorstep of a new industrial revolution, they say. Is it a good thing this revolution is coming? Doesn’t matter: This revolution is unavoidable, they say. Artificial intelligence is unavoidably coming at you! We hope we properly prepared you — please stop booing the commencement speaker!

So are you ready for the AI revolution, college graduate? You know some things your elders don’t. Older Americans think students use AI for learning, while younger Americans say it’s better for avoiding working.¹ Students who don’t use AI think AI use is making their classmates dumber.² AI is another gender-divider: College women are likelier than the men to notice the cognitive tradeoffs.³ But overall, the more young people use AI, the more they seem to hate it,⁴ and practically everyone on campus is worried AI will hurt their careers.⁵ At minimum it seems to hurt everybody’s sense of other people’s honesty. Deloitte data says “80% of leaders, managers, and workers are concerned their co-workers and teams are using AI to appear more productive than they are.”⁶ It’s not clear if there will be a job waiting for you, let alone a good one.

Well, it’s all very worrisome and confusing. You may wonder who your role models ought to be. If you’re an arts or humanities student aiming for those highest-heights — the path of glory that doesn’t end with becoming insanely rich — you might have noticed the leaders of your society depreciating everything you’re passionate about. You’ll have to find your own path up the rockface.

If you are young and ready to go, ready for life, ready to become yourself, you already know one thing: Pessimism is not very attractive. Pessimism might help you clearly perceive the mess you’re in, but pessimism is a shitty tool for digging out of it. You’ve got things to do, a world to change! …If the world will let you change it.

Let’s talk about this last option, the pragmatic mentality for the young person moving through the dark times. It starts by looking for other people.

“Street in Venice,” John Singer Sargent, 1882. (National Gallery of Art)

Although I’m far too skeptical a personality to believe in it for myself, practicing radical optimism sometimes works absurdly well. But only for a lucky few. Back in the heart of the Great Recession in what I thought were my vagabond days, after I collected an English degree and before I collected a career, I had a friend who traveled and lived abroad constantly, mostly in Central America. She did it with minimal expenses and minimal income, mostly from contract photography. She improvised. She couch-surfed. She seemed to trust strangers completely. She counted on somebody helpful to materialize whenever she was in a jam.

It worked! My friend had (and, more importantly, survived) many great adventures.

My friend attributed her persistent success to willpower completely. She refused to let a negative thought enter her head. She believed negativity created its own gravity, attracting bad luck, especially in airports and at borders. Her optimism had a fanatical dimension that ignored local conditions. Sometimes local conditions are a lot more ignorable than you think. Mostly, the lesson was that people are friendly and helpful if give them chances to be friendly and helpful, especially if it feels like fun. My friend was fun and made everything feel like an adventure.

I can’t endorse the sometimes magical properties of charisma and overconfidence (which cause more problems than they solve when they appear via celebrity politicians). For those of us who are born skeptics, there’s a difference between staying fully open to the world and believing in its inevitable benevolence. I am also, like most people, not THAT fun, so strangers are usually not going to feel randomly and benevolently fun while around me.

But there’s wisdom in remaining open to the mysteries of luck, even in unlucky times. I do believe in the sometimes magical power left by the residues of chance encounters, that little bit of paint that’s swapped when cars bump fenders.

I think, for example, about Pierre Louis Alexandre. Alexandre was likely born into slavery in 19th century French Guiana and escaped to freedom in Stockholm, where he worked as a stevedore on the docks and, when it got too cold in the Swedish winters, sat for portraits for the local art students. One of those students was Karin Bergöö, who would soon have to abandon her aspirations as a painter when she got married.⁷⁸ The portrait she produced, of an artist and a subject each outside the mainstream, was a student masterwork. Bergöö’s humane portrait of Alexandre survived the prejudices of its time to take up residence in our own. That kind of power could belong to any one of you. No one expects it; no one controls it.

Portrait of Pierre Louis Alexandre, by Karin Bergöö Larsson, 1879 - 1880. (National Gallery of Art)

The thing about luck is that you don’t get to pick which kind you get, the same way you can’t pick which time you get live in. One of my personal heroes is the economist Albert O. Hirschman, who eked out one of the best lives possible from one of the unluckiest times ever. He was a young Jewish German trying to find his way during the rise of Hitler in the 1930s. Many of his classmates became Nazis. His leftist friends couldn’t agree on how to fight back. Society was incapable of confronting the crisis; the political system gave in to gangsterism and terror. Hitler’s Germany would decide there was no place for enemies like the young Hirschman. Having a future meant creating one that didn’t exist yet. Hirschman did so brilliantly, with accomplices he’d encountered almost totally by chance.

The multilingual Hirschman hopped from country to country in Europe, looking for his future while also smuggling leftist correspondence across fascist borders in false-front luggage. He joined an antifascist brigade in the Spanish Civil War, then wisely beat a retreat before the Stalinist treachery and defeat set in. Amid the seas of refugees meeting rising tides of anti-immigrant reaction, Hirschman read voraciously and sought out unorthodox thinkers who put honesty and humanism before dogma. He decided to study economics and, seeking out unofficial sources of data, became one of the first economists to describe how fascist economies work (bullying trading partners and colonies to fund a protectionist war machine that can’t pay for itself without higher prices for its own citizens or more domination of everyone else’s).

When Germany started the Second World War, Hirschman joined the French army to fight against his homeland, then fled to Vichy-controlled Marseilles after the French almost immediately surrendered. Here is where the Hirschman story becomes legend. He meets a young American journalist at the Marseilles train station named Varian Fry who had come to France to smuggle out as many thinkers and artists as possible. Hirschman would become his fixer, and the result of this chance collaboration, known as the Emergency Rescue Committee, changed the intellectual and cultural history of the world. From Jeremy Adelman’s book “Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman”:

The list of the saved reads like a who's who: Hannah Arendt, André Breton, Marc Chagall, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Siegfried Kracauer, Wifredo Lam, Jacques Lipchitz, Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel (the serial wife of composer Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and novelist Franz Werfel), Heinrich Mann, Walter Mehring... it goes on. In all, over 2,000 refugees got out of France through the Emergency Rescue Committee's network. … [Fry] depended on the friendly but mysterious young translator for his underground experiences, facility with money, command of languages, and affection for breaking and bending rules. “He came carefully prepackaged, wrapped in false papers in which he was inordinately proud,” remembered one of his fellow rescuers. … “There’s such a thing as being too en règle [in compliance],” [Hirschman] told Fry. “It’s like a criminal who has too many alibis.”

Right before the doors to fascist Europe shut completely, Hirschman smuggled himself across the Spanish border with little except a false Lithuanian identity and a copy of Montaigne’s “Essays” in his sack. He was off to America, where he would become an unusually perceptive economist. He had been an outsider everywhere he went, which had taught him to see what others couldn’t.

One of Hirschman’s classic books, “Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States,” was about when people fight and when they quit. It was a subject he knew well. The book was dedicated to one of those chance influences on his life, his brother-in-law Eugenio Colorni, an Italian antifascist thinker who was murdered by a Nazi gang in 1944, “who taught me about small ideas and how they may grow.” Being open to the world as it actually was, Hirschman became a lucky student of unlucky times.

AI will boost productivity for us all and help us think — they say. Of course, anything with those powers just makes it easier to work alone. The important part of you, young graduate, the part of you that’s still coming, is bound up with the humans you haven’t met yet. Sometimes these creative collisions are with voices from the past, like Bergöö’s unlikely collaboration with Alexandre; or the inspiration Hirschman drew from the Montaigne essays while fleeing the Nazi death machine. Or maybe it’s like my old friend making adventures of her mundane encounters with whoever she ran into, including me. But it’s people who matter. J.M. Coetzee, in a majestic passage from his novel “Foe,” suggests luck is other people, and they tend to arrive in our lives when we let our guards down:

In a world of chance, is there a better and a worse? We yield to a stranger’s embrace or give ourselves to the waves; for the blink of an eyelid our vigilance relaxes; we are asleep; and when we awake, we have lost the direction of our lives. What are these blinks of an eyelid, against which the only defence is an eternal and inhuman wakefulness? Might they not be the cracks and chinks through which another voice, other voices, speak in our lives? By what right do we close our ears to them?

There’s one voice that’s completely safe for you to ignore, however: Change never comes from the speaker’s podium at commencement. Anybody up there is already talking about the past.

1. https://poll.qu.edu/poll-release?releaseid=3958

2. https://www.rand.org/news/press/2026/03/student-use-of-ai-for-homework-rises-as-concerns-grow.html

3. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/students/academics/2025/08/29/survey-college-students-views-ai

4. https://edsource.org/2026/csu-students-widely-use-ai-tools-but-mistrust-results-and-fear-job-impact/754924

5. https://www.gallup.com/analytics/651674/gen-z-research.aspx

6. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/human-capital-trends/2026/ai-cultural-debt.html

7. https://www.athenaartfoundation.org/pierre-louis-alexandre-by-mats-werner

8. https://www.athenaartfoundation.org/pierre-louis-alexandre