A commentary published in Fortune on Oct. 10, 2026 delivers a father’s message to his daughters — and to every young person starting out: do not sit out the artificial intelligence era, and do not let hype or fear make the choice for you. It is addressed to a generation weighing education and career decisions against claims about AI that run from utopian to apocalyptic.

The piece is written by the chief executive of Serve Robotics, a company that builds and operates autonomous delivery robots. Opting out and letting events take their course, the author warns, “could be a lapse of judgment you spend a lifetime regretting,” adding that some of AI’s most outspoken commentators, including Nobel laureates, have also been among the most mistaken.

A generation absorbing conflicting signals

The commentary opens with the contradictory narratives students now hear: professors announcing their AI policies; reports that AI is destroying the college experience; warnings that it might cause the extinction of the human race; and claims that it will cure all cancers, end global poverty, and deliver superintelligence for everyone.

“It’s no wonder college graduates are booing commencement speakers who talk about AI and doomerism has taken over the news,” the author writes. “Everything they have heard about it has convinced them that AI is malignant, or at least dangerously unpredictable.”

He acknowledges his own stake: he runs a company that makes autonomous robots, “one of the most exciting applications of recent advances in AI.” That position, he says, gives him street-level view of the tradeoffs. “Robots are not omniscient beings. They often encounter situations they can’t handle on their own (or they literally run into glass walls).”

On the other hand, robots enable humans to do more rewarding work, and even though robots may eventually displace some jobs, the track record shows that they also create many new jobs. Those who embrace new technologies are best placed to shape them and reap their benefits, the author argues, describing the present as “a dazzling period of invention” that gives young people the opportunity to help direct advances “toward a better future for yourself and the world at large.”

This time is not so different

The essay sets today’s anxieties against more than a century of history. Major breakthroughs, the author notes, have repeatedly sparked widespread fears of job loss, only to be followed by rising productivity and incomes, entirely new categories of work, and sustained growth in GDP.

Two hundred years ago, most people would have been subsistence farmers — as the author’s grandparents were. Today, only 2% of Americans work in agriculture. Farming jobs evaporated as technologies from fertilizers to combines enabled greater productivity, automation, and consolidation. For farming families, those were years of great disruption; at the same time, hunger declined to historically unprecedented levels, food prices fell, life expectancy rose, and countless new industries emerged to absorb the workers no longer needed in the fields.

Even as 90% of jobs were displaced, the total number of jobs increased dramatically — from 44 million in the United States in 1920 to 167 million in 2024, faster than the population grew — while unemployment remained remarkably stable through most of the century. A century ago, only 5% of workers, about 2 million people, held professional and managerial jobs; today the share is 35% of the workforce, or almost 60 million people.

The author highlights a profession nobody could have foreseen: 50 million people worldwide now earn money as social media influencers, and 6.5 million of them make $100,000 a year or more. “Could my grandparents have imagined working as social media influencers?” he asks. “Could we ourselves have imagined it, 20 years ago?”

“‘This time is different,’ the doomers say,” the essay notes. “But is it?”

The future will be built by you

With AI, the author expects a similar pattern: some jobs will disappear, most will be transformed, and many new jobs will emerge — including ones that cannot be imagined today. Future generations will view the drudgery of many current jobs with disbelief, just as people now regard lamp lighters, elevator men, or “knocker uppers” (human alarm clocks).

Tens of thousands of Americans already work directly in robotics, the essay notes, and many more work in the AI, engineering, manufacturing, maintenance, and operations services that surround the sector. “There is always more to do; often more exciting, more rewarding, more fruitful work, thanks to technology.”

The commentary cites one concrete case: Charlie Snodgrass, a robotics field technician — or “robot wrangler” — at Serve Robotics. Snodgrass saw his work as a delivery driver evaporate but found new work and retraining with Serve, supporting the company’s robots in Los Angeles. Serve currently operates more than 2,000 robots across 20 cities, and the author says the human workforce grows along with the robot fleet because “robots need humans.” The jobs the company creates, he writes, offer better pay and safer working conditions than the gig work they displace.

The message he wants every young person starting out to hear: “Do not let either hype or fear make this choice for you. Educate yourself on AI. Question it. Learn new ways to use it to solve problems worth solving.”

“The future of AI is not something that will simply happen to us; it will be built by those who choose to participate,” the essay concludes. “This is your moment to be one of them, and to help make what comes next better than what came before.” Whether AI follows that historical script or breaks from it is, on the essay’s own terms, an empirical question — and the employment and occupational figures it cites are the kind of data through which the answer will be measured.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune. This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.