Commencement season is here again—and this year, several speakers discovered that it’s hard to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.
Last week, Gloria Caulfield, chief executive of real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, He spoke at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we live in a time of “profound change” that can be both “exciting” and “frightening”.
“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield said — prompting the students in the audience to scream, grow louder, until Caulfield laughed, turning to the other speakers, “What happened?”
“Well, I struck a chord,” he said. Caulfield then tried to continue his speech, saying, “Just a few years ago, artificial intelligence was not a factor in our lives” – only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time with their loud cheers and applause.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response Friday when he spoke about artificial intelligence at the University of Arizona.
In Schmidt’s case, the criticism actually began before the speech, with some student groups demands his removal from the post of speech speaker due to a lawsuit in which his ex-boyfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual harassment. (He denied the allegations.) Therefore local news report, Before Schmidt took the stage, the buzz started.
But so does Schmidt received loud votes when he told the students, “You will help build artificial intelligence.” The cry was so insistent that Schmidt tried to talk her way through it, insisting, “Now you can assemble a team of AI agents to help you with parts you could never do alone. When someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, you don’t ask which seat, you just sit.”
To be fair, AI is not becoming the third rail each graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently He spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencementand when he said that AI was “reinventing computing,” he didn’t make a sound push.
Still, it’s no surprise that some students are in a boisterous mood. In recent Gallup pollOnly 43% of Americans ages 15-34 say it’s a good time to find a job locally, down sharply from 75% in 2022.
This pessimism is not just a response to the rise of artificial intelligence (a shift even tech industry workers are concerned), but a journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant suggested for many students, artificial intelligence has become the “brutal new face of hyperscale capitalism.”
“If I were in my early twenties, unemployed, and had more dreams for my future than getting into an LLM, I would scream out loud at the prospect of this next industrial revolution,” Merchant said.
Even if AI isn’t explicitly mentioned in graduation speeches, “sustainability” has been a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself he admitted “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that jobs are evaporating, that the climate is deteriorating, that politics is falling apart, and that you’re inheriting a mess you didn’t create.”
Meanwhile, Caulfield may also have misread his audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before even mentioning AI, Caulfield was already losing them by praising corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.
Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, He told “The New York Times”.“It wasn’t really one person who started booing. It was kind of like a collective, ‘This is bad.’
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