Will AI Take My Job? Young Adults' AI Worry Jumped 24 Points in 5 Years

In 2021, 31% of Americans under 30 told Pew Research Center they were more concerned than excited about AI's growing role in daily life. In 2026, that figure is 55%. The question "will AI take my job?" has moved from the middle of the career to the start of it: 73% of adults under 30 now expect AI to mean fewer jobs over the next 20 years, up from 61% in 2024.

Those numbers come from 2 Pew reports published a month apart. The first, by Colleen McClain and Eugenie Park, came out August 18 and covers US adults. The second, a 37-country study by Laura Silver, Richard Wike, Moira Fagan and Jordan Lippert released September 17, asked 42,151 people between February and May 2026 whether they expect AI to bring job losses or job growth over the next 20 years. Together, they unsettle a common assumption about who should be afraid.

The worry no longer follows age

The usual story holds that older workers have the most to lose from AI, because they have the least time to start over and the fewest years left to earn back the cost of retraining. Younger workers, by the same logic, have the runway to pick up new tools and treat a disruption as a detour. Pew's US numbers complicate that story considerably.

Adults under 30 now sit above the 30 to 49 group and well above the 50 to 64 group. Only Americans 65 and older report more concern, and they have the least working life left to protect. The global survey finds a similar turn on the jobs question itself. Among US adults ages 18 to 34, concern about AI and jobs rose from 40% in 2024 to 55% in 2026, which now matches the level among Americans 50 and older.

If anxiety tracked neatly with distance from retirement, the line would climb steadily with age. Instead, it dips in the middle and rises at both ends.

Majorities in 34 of 37 countries expect job losses

The US has plenty of company. In 34 of the 37 countries Pew surveyed, majorities or pluralities expect AI to cause job losses rather than job growth over the next 20 years. In wealthy economies including Australia, South Korea and the US, roughly 70% or more expect losses. In Canada, France, Singapore, Sweden, India, Indonesia and Malaysia, young adults ages 18 to 34 express more concern than adults 50 and older.

These are surveys of belief and fear, measuring what people expect, and they make no claim that AI has already eliminated these jobs. Expectation still has consequences. People who expect their field to shrink make different choices about what to study and when to switch careers.

The career trap has spread to the start of the career

I keep returning to one phrase for this: too old to retrain, too young to retire. It describes the professional in their 50s with a decade or more of work ahead, a skill set losing value faster than anyone planned, and no clear route back to relevance. That person has every reason to be anxious, and 47% of Americans ages 50 to 64 say they are more concerned than excited about AI.

The new Pew data shows the same trap reaching people at the opposite end of a career. By the old logic, a 25-year-old should be the calmest person in the building. Today, adults under 30 report more concern than adults twice their age. I read that as a sign about the half-life of skills. When the skills you learned in school start aging before you have paid off the loans that bought them, runway stops feeling like protection.

Think about the conversations at family dinner tables this fall. A parent in their late 50s wonders whether they can stay relevant for another decade. Their kid, early in a first job, wonders whether that job will still exist by the time a promotion comes around. They are asking the same question from opposite ends of a career. The younger one may now be the more worried of the two.

I started my career at Napster and Liquid Audio, inside one of the first industries to have its business model rewritten by software. The lesson I carried out of those years is that a skill starts aging the day you learn it. Your age only changes how many more times you will have to relearn.

The relearning clock now runs for every generation at once, and age no longer decides who feels it first.

That is the argument at the center of the book I am writing now, The Great Relearning.

Both ends of a career can ask better questions

For leaders, the practical lesson is that if your retraining budget assumes the newest hires will adapt on their own, the youngest people on your team may already disagree. Their concern has jumped 24 points in 5 years, and they are the workers with the most years to give an employer that invests in them. Take this question into your next leadership meeting: when did we last ask our newest hires what they are afraid of, and what would we do with the answer?

For everyone else, the question is more personal: whether you are early in your career or late in it, what can you do today that you could not do a year ago, and who paid for you to learn it? If the answer is little or nothing, that is the place to start, at any age.

Some employers are putting real money behind this. I wrote last week about the contrasting upskilling bets AT&T and Verizon are making, and earlier this month about how AI can take the raise before it takes the job. Both stories point at the same fork. A company can treat anxious young workers as a cost to manage, or as the people most ready to relearn, given the time and the money. More on that choice lives in my writing on the future of work.

Add up these private worries and they become a public question. A generation that expects its skills to expire before its student loans do will make cautious bets on careers and on starting families, and those bets shape the economy everyone else lives in.

Pew asked 42,151 people whether AI will take their jobs. Every one of them, at 25 or at 65, also holds the answer to a second question: how fast can I learn the next one? Has your team started asking it? If you want to think it through together, I'm easy to find.

Here is what makes Alex a credible voice on this topic: Alex shaped Cisco's $1.1B innovation portfolio over 20 years and now advises the California State University system on AI governance, where the students entering the job market in Pew's under-30 numbers are the people the work is for.

Bring Alex in to help your leadership team plan for the half-life of skills →