Will Gen Z reject the AI their parents built? | Charterhouse School

We keep telling the young that artificial intelligence is inevitable. They have started to ask who decided that, and why we expect their gratitude.

Earlier this year, Eric Schmidt stood before the graduating class of the University of Arizona and was booed. The disapproval came from the very people he had come to inspire. The former chief executive of Google had chosen artificial intelligence as his theme, and the harder he insisted the future was unwritten and theirs to shape, the louder the room disagreed.

The easy reading is ingratitude: an architect of the digital age offering hard-won wisdom to a generation too anxious to take it. "I can hear you. There is a fear," he told them. But the boos were not fear, or not only that. They were a verdict, and we would do well to hear it out before we wave it away.

We have taken to calling AI inevitable, as though the word closes the argument. It doesn't. Inevitability is rarely a neutral observation. More often it is a manoeuvre, the favourite of people who have already won and would rather not debate it again. Call a thing inevitable and you convert a choice into a forecast. You move it from the column marked things we are deciding to the column marked weather. Nobody argues with the weather. You adapt, or you get wet.

A generation raised online spots this sleight of hand at once. Schmidt said the future was unwritten, but the message almost everyone in his chair really carries is plainer: the technology is coming, and your job is to keep up. That is not an invitation to shape the future. It is a notice to vacate the present.

Their scepticism was learned the hard way. They are the first adults to have grown up entirely inside the last great promise the technology industry made them: that social media would connect the world and give everyone a voice. Some of it came true. They also watched the public sphere coarsen, and tools built for connection curdle into machines for loneliness. They are wary of the new not because they fail to grasp it, but because they grasped the last one all too well. So when a familiar figure, older, richer and insulated from the fallout, promises that this time the disruption is for their good, they do the rational thing and withhold their trust. The boos were not a tantrum. They were a credit check.

Every generation bequeaths the next a world it did not ask for. The Victorians left us the railways and the smoke; the post-war generation left us the bomb and the antibiotic. But there is a difference between inheriting a settled world, with its rules and its scars, and being handed a live wire by people who admit they are not quite sure what it will do.

Gen Z will use AI. The tools are too capable and too embedded for any romantic refusal to hold. The real question is whether they will accept the terms, and I suspect the answer, increasingly, is no. They know switching it off is a fantasy. What they reject is the posture, the assumption that the design, pace, ownership and governance of the most consequential tool of their lives should be settled by people who will not be around to live with the results. That is the rebellion worth taking seriously, because it is the reasonable one.

What is at stake is trust, and trust cannot be asserted from a podium. It is earned slowly, by people willing to listen before they instruct, to admit what they do not know, and to treat the next generation as co-authors of the future rather than its passive recipients.

I write as one of the generation doing the handing over, and as someone who works every day alongside the young people who will live in the world we are building. In schools, the pull of the moment is to become adoption centres, measuring success by how fluently a pupil can coax an answer from a model. That is simply "adapt or be left behind" in a blazer. It mistakes competence for agency.

When we set out to build an approach to AI literacy at Charterhouse, the aim was to make pupils harder to fool. Education is where the handover between generations literally takes place, in a setting still built on trust rather than transaction. That makes the school the one place where the listening posture can be modelled rather than preached. Teach the young not merely to use these tools but to interrogate them: how they work and where they fail, whose interests they serve, what they cost, and on what terms they ought to be governed. We want informed authors, fluent enough to argue back and confident enough to know they are entitled to. Done well, this is how "inevitable" is quietly converted back into "negotiable".

What the young will not forgive is being told the matter is already settled: that a technology of this magnitude arrived fully formed, that no one need seek their permission, and that their only task is to adapt and be grateful. The boos at Arizona were not the end of a conversation. They were a signal. If we hear it clearly, education may be where the most important response begins.