Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

brcmthrowaway

College students are cooked for entry level work. I'm guessing there will soon be a government mandate requiring some percentage of NCGs to be hired, similar to India and other countries with huge cohorts.

ethanplant

I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos. Everyone, and especially new grads constantly hear that AI is going to replace every job. And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?” Of course people are going to react negatively when they hear, “the machines are going to take your jobs from you. No, we don’t care how you’ll be able to pay your rent or put food on the table”.

booleandilemma

There is nothing about AI that seems like it's going to have a net positive for humanity. Faster code? Sure. Better chatbots? Sure. Textual analysis? Sure. But the downside, and it's huge, is massive unemployment and societal collapse. Nothing AI brings to the table is worth having an unemployment rate of 25% (or more). Our society is simply not ready for this. We need to rework things from the ground up, not proceed blindly (which is what we're currently doing), if we want to successfully integrate AI into our lives without massive pain.

palmotea

Those kids are crazy. We're finally close to realizing the dream of making labor obsolete, how could they not be excited and enthusiastic about the future? Most of them will no longer needed, and thankfully those that are still needed can be paid more reasonable wages (i.e. lower ones). It's a win-win for everyone. The lower prices enabled by automation allow them to stretch their savings or inheritance further before its exhausted.

Mordisquitos

What I found surprising of the couple of video examples I've seen was not the students' reactions; those were completely predictable. Rather, what most stood out to me was the absolute detachment displayed by the speakers in believing that the students would like to hear their dystopian AI maximalism, and their inability to read the room and understand the reaction from the audience.

rybosworld

Executives of these tech companies keep saying the automation of intelligence will drive job creation because previous waves of automation did the same. To anyone with a brain, that is obviously not true. If AI continues to improve at the pace that it has been, why would anyone hire a human to do the thinking? Human intelligence will be orders of magnitude more expensive, and much slower... The tech executives know this and they actually just do not care. The reason they are saying it will drive job creation is just to temporarily keep worker anxiety levels to a minimum. To be clear, I am not claiming that all human work will be automated away soon. Just that a huge portion of it will be.

throwaway27448

Who thought it was a good idea to involve AI into a commencement speech? Talk about showing contempt to the graduates!

jcranmer

I know a lot of people are going to focus on the employment issue for new graduates, but there's another dimension to consider: this group of students is going to be the first group who have gone through all of college with the enhanced cheating power of LLMs. The majority of people graduating will either have used LLMs to cheat on some classes, or at least known someone who did so. Which incidentally also means that they have a much better idea than the speakers do about how good these AI tools at the variety of tasks someone in an entry-level role might be expected to do. It is also worth noting that Gen Z in general is the most skeptical of the generations of the utility of AI.

dakiol

People are not idiots. AI benefits only the ones at the top of the chain, and the 10% of the rest of us. Are you in the top 10%? No, you typically are in the bottom 90%. So we don't want AI, we don't want the top getting richer at our expenses. We just want a job to bring bread home and keeping pushing our store while being "happy". You take that away from us, just so you can double your net worth, and well, bad things will start to happen

evil-olive

> “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you,” Schmidt responded as the boos continued. “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating … and I understand that fear.” 71 year old man with a net worth of $64 billion [0] tells a bunch of 20-somethings (many of whom have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that they will need to start repaying soon) that he understands how they feel. yeah, I can't imagine why he got a hostile response from the crowd... 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

jdw64

>It felt like a big advertisement. It felt like the longest Gemini ad ever If anything, this incident might just inspire Eric Schmidt to cut even more entry-level data processing jobs and deploy a few extra agents to automate them

monknomo

Commencements are about the students, and celebrating their hard work and achievements over several years. A common thread in these commencements with booing is that the speaker is not centering the student. They're centering AI, and talking about AI's potential, which is, at best, orthogonal to the student's potential, and possibly actively detrimental. Small wonder

everyone

In theory more automation = less drudge work for humans, so its great. But in practice, in corrupt societies, elites reap all the benefits while the lower classes eat all the downsides. The thing is though, this is not a tech problem, it's a society problem. Elites will use literally any technology from any era to do the same thing. It's been the case for 1000's of years, even Romans had factories and slave powered mega-farms for example. Lots of countries are extremely corrupt, they have systems that allow power to concentrate over time (political/ military/ financial, it doesnt matter, it ends up the same either way. Eg. With enough financial power you also gain all the political power and vice versa). That's the root issue people should be trying to fix imo. And how to fix? I dunno, something drastic, we probably need something like the French revolutions.

itsafarqueue

Herein lies the seeds of the Revolution that is being fomented by the very class of educators, speakers, and generationally privileged who exhibit casual, naive contempt for the audience they drone on their tone-deaf sermons, utterly oblivious to the toxic duplicity of the messages they shove down throats of those who bear the worst of the costs externalised by those spreading “the good word”. They can all burn.

DonsDiscountGas

> “His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students,” said Malone. “We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?” It's a perfectly fair question and the answer is that being a practitioner is different from being a student. If you want to hear some nice music you can learn to play and then record yourself, or you can buy/rent/freely acquire an existing recording. Both valid options, one is obviously a lot faster. If you want to be able to play music yourself, you have to do it yourself. Learning can't be outsourced. Somebody really should be explaining that to students.

amanaplanacanal

Billionaires greasing the tracks to the Butlerian Jihad.

ChrisArchitect

[dupe] The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188310 Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419 Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 An AI Hate Wave Is Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318

Garlef

"Do you guys not have phones?"

1vuio0pswjnm7

Are "tech" workers pawns in the game

soundworlds

It is incredibly important for people to be aware that this is one of the few new technologies where older generations are far more optimistic than younger generations. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about it, and the number is falling: https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep... To me this signals something very fragile about the current frontier AI Org's strategies.