Is AI Weakening America’s Animal Spirits?
Over the past decade, Pulsenomics has tracked American consumer sentiment and underlying economic impulses using more than 3.4 million data points collected to date from over 42,000 respondents to the Pulsenomics Animal Spirits Survey (PASS). What started as a data experiment and study of legacy confidence and sentiment indexes has evolved into a novel, systematic framework designed to track consumer moods and expectations pertinent to the 21st century economy.
One of dozens of PASS questions is timely and revealing:
“More often than not, do new technologies tend to create jobs or destroy jobs?”
The latest edition of PASS was completed in late November (1,602 respondents, nationally representative). The results offer context for — and in some cases a counterpoint to — the growing wave of reporting warning that artificial intelligence may displace large numbers of workers.
A clear inflection
The chart below summarizes net sentiment scores* from PASS each November since just prior to the onset of COVID.
From 2019 through 2023, Americans consistently believed that new technologies created more jobs than they destroyed. That optimism weakened sharply in 2024 and, in 2025, turned net negative for the first time in our tracking history.
The timing is notable. The deterioration coincides with the rapid commercialization of generative AI and a rise in news coverage linking AI adoption to layoffs, hiring freezes, and job automation. While technological change has always produced winners and losers, the speed and visibility of AI’s advance may have begun to alter how consumers assess the net impact of technological progress on job availability.
Sharp divergence beneath the headline score
While the top-line results in the chart show a shift toward pessimism, the latest PASS data also reveal noteworthy differences across certain demographic and socioeconomic groups (see table below). For example, members of Gen Z are pessimistic regarding the net jobs impact of new technologies (perhaps reflecting elevated anxiety among younger workers entering an AI-transformed labor market), while older generations are less alarmed but cautious. Notably, tech-induced job-loss concerns are more pronounced among lower-income and less-educated respondents, while higher-income and more highly educated consumers remain confident that technology will generate net employment gains (this finding complicates the narrative that AI primarily threatens white-collar work).
Closing thought
Recent surveys from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and widespread media reporting show rising perceived job-loss risk, particularly as AI adoption accelerates. As AI has moved from promise to practice, sentiment has shifted from broad confidence toward greater caution. PASS supports the notion that optimism about technology and jobs is currently eroding. But it also underscores that the erosion is uneven, shaped by perceived vulnerability, and subject to change.