Here’s a rare news event that never happened, my god. a week: a university commencement speech was met with hostility because the speaker praised artificial intelligence.
404 Media has acquired images:
To be fair, the speaker, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, was at least trying to thread the needle, vaguely empathizing with the students. “In your generation, the future is already written, the cars are coming, the jobs are evaporating, the climate is changing, politics is falling apart, and you’re inheriting a mess you didn’t create” he said.
But, as with real estate executive Gloria Caulfield a week ago, a pro-AI speech drew almost the same reactionIt’s easy to see how Schmidt’s words came across as presumptuous to a crowd that has heard the AI-inevitability message a million times. He can be heard telling the crowd of young people that they will “help build AI” and “It’s okay if you’re not interested in science because AI will touch everything.”
In perhaps the most ill-advised moment in 404 media footage, Schmidt says:
“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.”
I guess the crowd is probably already describing itself falls to the task of steering in the big “rocket ship” of artificial intelligence, but Schmidt revealed it anyway.
Premeditated booing of controversial speakers is common and not very newsworthy. In fact, this also happened last week As anti-abolitionist cultural figure Jonathan Haidt noted while speaking at NYU. According to the topic of his speech – mainly, young people are not fragile snowflakes— a low-energy hum of displeasure seems baked into his plan.
But it is worth paying attention to the speaker’s words two similar words of speakers – ignites unplanned shouts. In fact, I’d argue that you can use the spontaneous shouts and heckling in response to the commencement speakers’ speeches as a sort of rough barometer for picking up the populist trends that will define the next decade, right or wrong, in politics.
For example, in 2001, A Beginning of December Just two months after the 9/11 attacks, newspaper publisher Janis Besler Heaphy spoke to Cal State Sacramento graduates and urged vigilance about privacy and freedom at a jingoistic moment in history. “To what extent are we willing to compromise our civil liberties for the sake of security?” and saying “The Constitution is our right to protest government policy” didn’t resonate at the time – and indeed years later – and Heaphy was banished from the stage altogether.
In May 2016, Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas’ Cal State Fullerton commencement speech received a more hostile reaction than expected from the MAGA audience in central California’s Republican-friendly Orange County. In personnel You can see him invoking then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as he defends the news media against the growing tide of discontent. “Now they’re even accusing us, the media, of creating Donald Trump. Imagine that. Isn’t that terrible?” An eerie roar begins, and then Salinas briefly begins to speak Spanish. This roar is incomprehensible mockery. According to one news account, someone even shouted “Speak English”.
Ten years later, well, here we are. A Survey from March Trump’s immigration policies have a net approval rating of -19, but the intensity of disapproval of the concept of artificial intelligence appears worse in the same poll (although the finding is statistically the same) at -20 net approval.
So if we use startup speech reactions as our tea leaves, the next decade could see a long-term negative reaction to AI. Facing such a moment, perhaps, With lyrics by Blood in the Machine’s Brian Merchant“is a program to reject generative artificial intelligence under conditions of mining and exploitation, to protect labor from incompetence, wage degradation and control, and to reject the intrusion of artificial intelligence into the spheres of public life. Silicon Valley seeks to colonize and profit.” I just mean in terms of vibes.
Anyway, if you’re a business mogul planning to pitch to a crowd of college graduates in the next few weeks, try to remember who you’re talking to. These people have probably spent four years reading more books than they have in the last 20 years. They’re already well-informed about AI, thank you, and they’re about to jump into the new brutal new job hellscape you’ve created to compete with the millions of spambots and OpenClaw agents for the scarce seats on your AI rocket ship.
