Old people often have a very interesting relationship with technology and change (I say that tongue in cheek as I recognize that I’m no spring chicken, and at what point do you become “old”?). I don’t know about your parents, but my mom is fun-ny with a capital F when it comes to technology. For the longest time, getting her to send, or open, an email attachment was a task. Downloading and setting up new apps is still an adventure (one my sister usually has to help with). Even reading this publication has caused some confusion. More than once, my mom has insisted I sent her a recent essay when I hadn’t. Eventually we realized she was seeing Facebook notifications about my posts and interpreting them as emails from me. When I suggested she subscribe so she could get the essays directly, she quickly said, “I don’t know how to do that.”
When the buzz around ChatGPT got so loud that you couldn’t help but at least hear about it on the morning news, my mom would refer to it as “that ChatABC” or “ChatTPG” or any other wrong, but similar name under the sun. She’d follow the misnaming up with something like, “well, you’re not going to see me using that ChatTPC! People just give over everything to technology. They act like they can’t even think without it!”
Is AI Unavoidable?
So of course in this age where AI is seemingly everywhere, I think and worry a lot about my mom, and people like her. There are lots of people who can’t or simply don’t want to learn some new technology. There are people whose exposure is so peripheral that it would never cross their minds as something that they should ever use.
Working in tech, I’m bombarded every day by people praising AI for how useful and efficient it is. How it’s going to “10x” everything and render actual people mostly useless. Or how the people who stay afloat will be those who know how to guide AI to do the work. Or even just people saying how AI has made their lives more efficient, given them a thought partner, a therapist, and a whole host of other ways of using it (that they probably should not be doing, but that’s another story). It makes it hard to understand what’s really going on with people and this technology. What’s really happening outside of the tech bubble?
The Question: AI Risk
Everyone wants to know if AI is going to take their job. They want to know if it will render them obsolete. But with my mom in the forefront of my thoughts, I’ve been wondering how many people there are like her, who have no interest in ever using AI. Who are these people? What will happen to them as the way we do things continues to change and they refuse to?
My gut tells me that there is a swath of people that will never jump on the AI bandwagon. For some of them, this will be just fine. They’re in jobs that are slow to change or won’t be heavily affected anytime soon. They can ride this out until they leave the workforce. And for others this will cost them — they’re in areas that change fast and so they will need to try to change as well.
If you’ve read any of my essays before, you know this is the point where I’d say, “and so I decided to go to the data to figure this all out”. But the problem here is that the data that would directly answer these questions is not out there. We don’t yet know the degree to which these technologies will affect jobs, nor do we know which jobs will be affected. We can’t yet imagine the ways that AI will become integral to our everyday lives outside of work. So, instead of pretending I can deduce answers for questions none of us really have answers to, I decided to get some perspective instead. I wanted to get a better grip on who of older adults are more likely to never use AI.
The AI Adoption Landscape for Older Adults
Using Pew survey data and U.S. demographic data from the American Community Survey (ACS), I mapped out AI interactions vs willingness to use AI for subgroups of adults age fifty and over. Adding the ACS data to the mix allows us to get an idea of the size of each subgroup. Frankly, there are some things that I saw that are not surprising to me.
- older adults in the 65+ age bracket are at greater risk of not using AI
- education level influences AI usage, where people with college degrees or higher are more likely to interact with it
- Black adults are the most unwilling group age 50-64 to use AI
Below you can see a visualization of this data. Hover on the bubbles to get more information about each group. Red represents high non-use risk; orange is moderate risk; and green is likely adopters. Note that the bubbles have been spread apart for ease of viewing.
I think the thing to keep in mind is that this group of adults is 120 million strong, making up 35% of the population. 46% of them are in the workforce. This is no insignificant group of people that we can ignore because they’re “over the hill”.
And what’s more, their education and jobs make them less likely to adopt AI. 70% of them have less than a bachelor’s degree. But only about 22% of them work in jobs that we all suspect will be heavily impacted by AI:
- Management, Business, and Financial Occupations
- Office and Administrative Support Occupations
- Sales and Related Occupations
- Computer, Engineering, and Science Occupations
A Reminder About New Technology
If there’s anything I take away from this is that my mom is not alone. She may be in a subgroup that is at a higher risk for not adopting AI within this age demographic, but these bubbles are mostly clustered in the same quadrant — non-use. The interesting thing is that these data suggest something deeper than just “older adults resist technology”. The differences in these subgroups suggest that adoption is tied to culture, education, and exposure. When we consider these factors, the size and the characteristics of people that could possibly never jump on the AI bandwagon becomes clearer.
This is just another reminder that just because there’s a hype cycle about something, and just because you may be in a bubble where everyone is plugged into that hype, there are always people for whom this is not true. And those reasons can be complex. For better or worse, some people will never open a tool like ChatPGT…ChatPHT…uh, you know what I mean.
If you enjoyed this essay, you might like Mapping Memory: The Neighborhood That Raised Me
Sources
American Community Survey. ACS. Steven Ruggles, Sarah Flood, Matthew Sobek, Daniel Backman, Grace Cooper, Julia A. Rivera Drew, Stephanie Richards, Renae Rodgers, Jonathan Schroeder, and Kari C.W. Williams. IPUMS USA: Version 16.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2025. https://doi.org/10.18128/D010.V16.0
Pew Research. https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/ai-in-americans-lives-awareness-experiences-and-attitudes/
Brookings. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-are-americans-using-ai-evidence-from-a-nationwide-survey/
