Yesterday I spent the afternoon with Elizabeth’s family celebrating an unusual milestone. Two sisters, one graduating from high school and the other from college, were being honored together. It was a warm gathering, much smaller than I had expected. There were only a handful of younger people, and by the end of the evening I noticed Cece, the college graduate and her friend sitting quietly together.

I pulled my chair over, introduced myself, and told them that I had become interested in collecting family stories. Cece searched for a memory to tell, and I reached for my phone.

“I’d love to record it with ChatGPT,” I said.

The reaction was immediate.

“No. We want nothing to do with AI.”

The strength of their response caught me completely off guard. I put my phone away.

Instead of defending AI, I simply asked why.

Their concerns centered on something I find difficult to answer honestly: AI’s contribution to the environmental crisis. As they spoke, I found myself agreeing with much of what they were saying. My generation should have done more to slow the destruction of the planet. We leave the next generation a world that is warmer, more unstable, and burdened with problems they did not create. I still hold onto the hope—perhaps an improbable one—that AI may become part of the solution rather than simply another cause of the problem. But that wasn’t the conversation they wanted to have, and I respected that.

What surprised me most was not that they disagreed with me. It was how deeply they had already thought about the issue. They spoke with conviction and clarity. I realized very quickly that this was not the moment for an older man to lecture. It was a moment to listen.

Later, I remembered arguing with my Uncle Ray over games of chess when I was about their age. He had been a tail gunner during World War II, and I was certain I understood the world better than he did. I challenged him with all the confidence that comes so naturally to youth. Looking back, I smiled. Perhaps every generation believes it is seeing something the previous one has missed.

The irony is that I had not gone over to persuade these two young women of anything. I genuinely wanted to hear what they thought. And in the end, that is exactly what happened.

I came away humbled.

Not because they changed my mind, but because they reminded me how much I still have to learn. If I hope to understand the world that is emerging, I need to spend less time explaining AI and more time listening to the generation that will live with its consequences the longest.