5 ms·

Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI

79 points by poisonfountain 5mo ago

rvz 5mo ago
Figure 1 - Former Google CEO with a vested interest in AI companies who just wants to watch the world burn tokens for the 'benefit of humanity'.
yacin 5mo ago
Out of touch exec commencement speeches will continue until morale improves.
stavros 5mo ago
Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
- Austizzle 5mo ago
  I feel like it's a mix of so many things it's hard to know the answers to any of these questions. - the job market is harder now, apparently because of AI - environmental concerns due to data centers - the ethical issues with scraping people's copyright data to power AI - slop overwhelming the Internet, fake videos all over tiktok that seem real - safety issues like AI psychosis The world is hard right now, and a lot of the things that make it hard seem to intersect in all sorts of ways with the way AI is being developed, run, and used. If you solve one of those issues, you still haven't solved the other ones.
  - krackers 5mo ago
    I don't think AI safety/psychosis/alignment issues are on most people's minds. All of the other ones are basically downstream of AI furthering wealth inequality. Job market for obvious reasons. Environmental concerns are mostly downstream of the fact that cities are suddenly accommodating data centers while they didn't care about promoting growth of infrastructure before, and citizens are asked to foot the electrical/water bills. (People would not care about environmental impacts as much if they weren't immediately impacted, say the DCs were built in Africa). Also missed is the pushback against AI art: the further devaluation of talent, and an associated loss of meaning many people have. I think this is probably still downstream of it threatening jobs though, since people would not react as violently if they could truly treat art as a hobby instead of as a profession.
- AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
  Speaking just for myself: I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix. I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the prompt, not the AI output. And I hate the AI companies, not so much because AI is solely in the hands of a few companies, but because they're trying to make it appear so inevitable and once-in-a-lifetime-get-on-it-now-or-be-left-behind-forever that everyone is losing their minds and chasing it like lemmings. I'm against all of it. I actually care about people. Computers are tools; that's all. When the tools make it harder to connect with other humans in a human way, when the contact turns into this weird unnatural garbage where I can't hear the heart of the person on the other side, then computers are bad tools that need to stop being used. (Yes, you could have "corporate speak" that had the same problems, but at least that came at the speed that humans can type. AI lets it flow far faster, fast enough that it drowns out actual human communication. That's a huge loss.)
  - potsandpans 5mo ago
    [flagged]
    - kevin948 5mo ago
      No need to be so dismissively pathological. If you disagree, that's one thing, but this reads as 'look at this sad, crazy fool' when this is a pretty understandable reaction to feeling alienated by the way in which LLMs are being forcefully pushed in both personal and professional domains and the oft ensuing breakdown in human to human communication. 'Who does this technology serve?' is a valid question and 'not us' is a valid answer. Sure, the poster's feelings may stem from a 'wider set of technology/tooling', but that doesn't necessarily take from the point. People are sensing that LLM technology is being used as an accelerant for further alienation, whether attributed perfectly to the specific technology or not.
      - 5mo ago
- AlexeyBrin 5mo ago
  Honest answer: nobody knows. You will need to create a poll large enough of people representing all society and ask the questions. Most people in tech (I include myself here) just speculate and project their own bias on the entire population.
- xscott 5mo ago
  For me, I'm very enthusiastic about it's use for programming, mathematics, and as a teaching assistant[0]. I'm very worried about it being used for automated surveillance, terrible customer service, and deceptive targeted advertisements. I'm unconcerned about slop and alignment issues. I'm very much in favor of local models (democratization), just like I'm a fan of Wikipedia for making so many topics available to everyone for free. [0] I don't see a lot of people using LLMs to learn a new topic, but I had a really great experience by walking through some math I wanted to know, forcing it to go slowly, and writing code and test cases for each concept to make sure it wasn't hallucinating. There are no "choose your own adventure" textbooks like this, and there are no professors who would be that patient with me in office hours. I don't think it will work well for unmotivated learners.
- hackable_sand 5mo ago
  For one thing, we were promised AI and we got... a chatbot. So it pretty much starts with the lies and scams. You could argue this is the same cultural force behind NFTs for instance.
  - stavros 5mo ago
    What kind of AI were you expecting that wouldn't be "a chatbot"?
    - hackable_sand 5mo ago
      It's hard to say. Perhaps being at the epicenter of Silicon Valley's nouveau AI revolution tinted my glasses. But I remember a distinct air of optimism, that humanity was working towards some breakthrough in the fundamental secrets of consciousness. Let me be frank, it doesn't matter how well the machine works if it is weaponized against people. If it systematically degrades our humanity. I am a pacifist, so I believe in the inherit value of living things. I expected something graceful and beautiful, with unquestionable value to the people interacting with it. Instead Silicon Valley produced slave-humunculi, stunted aberrations of "intelligence". This entire movement is basically a two-faced insult to life. -- That being said, for all the things LLMs are capable of, you could pay a living, breathing person to do, more efficiently, faster, and for cheaper. So the entire effort was for... what?
      - CHB0403085482 5mo ago
        AI on chess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz5EFsSbQ7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz5EFsSbQ7U
    - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
      For one thing, I would've expected it to actually have intelligence. All we currently have is a stochastic parrot without any intelligence or ability to reason.
      - 5mo ago
- bluefirebrand 5mo ago
  > are people against AI Personally, yes. I'm against anything that seems poised to devalue human life
- watwut 5mo ago
  Imo, tech leaders managed to make themselves seem odious so much, that I am scared of any additional power they will get. If I run Claude at home and it is now source of info and trained to be effective right wing propagandist (most subtle then grok) with no one except new CEO being able to change it, I am scared of it.
- porknbeans00 5mo ago
  AI to me is very dangerous. And we're throwing it into mission critical shit with reckless abandon. And the operative word there is RECKLESS. It's non deterministic by its nature. Without good frameworks and safeguards it's unpredictable. We know that much for certain. But it's worse than that. We don't know all the attack vectors for prompt escapes yet at all. That's barely been figured out. And the psychological toll of working in slop heavy environments is CLEARLY VERY BAD. So ... we raced a technology out the door without even minimal research into how to do that safely or effectively. As an industry we just shot ourselves in both knees and made the case for a regulatory blow back of epic proportions. And like... That sucks. Complete failure of leadership across the entire industry. Short term gains for short term losses followed by long term losses.
- latexr 5mo ago
  It’s not a simple A or B. There are plenty of reasons to be against AI, and they can depend on where you live or how you are affected by it. The citizens who just got told they’ll be left without electricity because it’ll be rerouted to a nearby data centre have good reason to be against it. As do the people affected by their noise. People concerned with the environmental impact, the rising prices of consumer hardware, the consolidation of power, their use for surveillance, propaganda, killing, discrimination, the proliferation of AI psychosis, carelessness and loss of skills, loss of jobs without a safety net, erosion of online discourse, increased distrust of scientific papers… The list goes on and on.
- binary132 5mo ago
  Obviously, young people coming up into a world full of guys like him telling them that AI is going to eat their jobs and refusing to hire them for reasonable wages are not really in favor of specifically that in particular.
  - stavros 5mo ago
    Yeah but as far as potential goes, "AI will take your job" isn't that much worse than "you'll be working 12 hours in an Amazon warehouse with a 2 minute pee break for minimum wage". I feel like American society is particularly vulnerable to this, where nobody opposes anything that doesn't affect them personally, which means that resistance to any gradual erosion of liberties is always tiny. You can pass anything you want as long as you do it slowly, because resistance will always be limited to a small segment of the population at a time. It's very "first they came for the communists".
float4 5mo ago
As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
- seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
  Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.
  - ompogUe 5mo ago
    What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. While I did appreciate having access to stacks of modern computer manuals, it didn't last long: once the mom-and-pops were out of business, the big box stores pivoted to converting half of their floor space to selling candles and pillows.
    - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
      There was never much money in books, B&N would always make their margins on their cafe and their overprice gifts and toys. Amazon never really made money from books either, and they don't really make it on retail, but the data they get from retail is very valuable and profitable. Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.
    - zimpenfish 5mo ago
      > What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. Weirdly, in (central) London, that didn't happen - the smaller stores survived people like Borders et al. The only "big" stores there now are Foyles[0] and Waterstones (who own Foyles.) [0] In its new soulless incarnation.
lioeters 5mo ago
Ex-CEO of Google telling a crowd of young graduates entering society, "You will work for AI." Then trying to counter the boos with remarks like: "If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on." This is not only about AI the technology, it's the deserved anger against the privileged and powerful for their utter mismanagement of society. The youth sees through the bullshit. Good on them, there may be hope for humanity after all.
- rvz 5mo ago
  The worst part was he was smirking. At this point, people in tech are just as hated as bankers and the general public will see them as their enemies, taking away their job, but this time permanently. Of course he knows there will be a crash in this, so its unsurprising to see this reaction. But the point is, Schmidt does not care either way as he stands to benefit and expects humanity to be paying for the tokens. He is already prepared for the eventual backlash anyway.
- foldr 5mo ago
  >If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on This doesn't even work as a metaphor. I absolutely would not jump on the chance to ride on a literal rocket ship without asking a hell of a lot of questions first!
  - epoxyhockey 5mo ago
    This doesn't even work as a metaphor The whole speech was probably written by AI anyway </sarcasm>
  - watwut 5mo ago
    Yeah, that was my first thought too. If I am character in a sci-fi book (and he is old enough to read those), I totally jump on it. But here, back in the real world, with one life to live, majority of people will simply refuse because they have lives and sane interested person asks a lot of questions. I mean, was he one of early Titan submersible passengers? And that one guaranteed quick death rather then prolonged one or slavery or what have you.
ChrisArchitect 5mo ago
More discussion on the linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674
- tim333 5mo ago
  That was about a different speaker, although still booing AI.
tim333 5mo ago
They have the full speech here https://youtu.be/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7968 https://youtu.be/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7968 There's quite a lot less booing vs cheering compared with the linked recording which I guess was done on a phone near some people who didn't like it.
- alanwreath 5mo ago
  I’m not sure if you were expecting the boo’s to totally drown out the speaker. The audio system for orators in those types of venues are made to focus on the orators voice, not that of the audience. The fact that they were audible at all (they WERE) is to say they were substantial. The fact Schmidt recognized hearing them and from time to time had to pause to make a point means he was speaking through the crowds discontent. It was a good watch - I appreciated hearing the audible boos. I’m not the only one in the room who is concerned about the adoption of AI being overly cavalier without clear evidence it’s even worth it / or that you go to school and are told great now you MUST learn this, your degree choice (your dream) is moot - the message has been “deal with it”. That’s not to say there isn’t already plenty evidence online that supports the thought, but hearing it from a college campus audience makes me think about what my son is going into right now, that my concern is real. I’m torn really because I am already benefitting from the tools provided. I can see their utility. And, though, I actually agree with Schmidt’s overall message - it was truthful and felt genuine, it’s an unfortunate reality. Who’s going to cheer that? So good on him for being naive to that fact or willing to endure an obvious boo fest. AI’s fun but life is more fun. Speed is fun, but so is sitting down for a sec to chat with friends. Maybe the backlash against AI is because we’re still grappling with the onslaught of the internet and smart phones. The unintended negative effects we have yet to solve today (Schmidt even starts his speech referring to them before he brings up AI almost as if to say, “look how well these blunders went, now hold my beer”). Youth and people in general feel robbed, they have become a cog in someone else’s machine and AI doesn’t free you from it - it’s not like businesses are saying “oh excellent! we can get the work done faster, let’s decrease the amount of hours we make people work to get their wage. Let’s let them benefit from this boon of productivity.” No! The opposite, “We will kick you and if you want to stay, be happy you’re here and willing to run in this fever pitch rat race that has just introduced a rapidly increasing devourer that runs behind you.” … “Want weekends!? AI doesn’t, hmm is that the way you ‘demonstrate what it means to be human’?” My mind keeps on thinking that what I am really being told is it’s time to start my own business because I will only ever be the person to give me a weekend off.

rvz 5mo ago

Figure 1 - Former Google CEO with a vested interest in AI companies who just wants to watch the world burn tokens for the 'benefit of humanity'.

yacin 5mo ago

Out of touch exec commencement speeches will continue until morale improves.

stavros 5mo ago

Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).

Austizzle 5mo ago
I feel like it's a mix of so many things it's hard to know the answers to any of these questions. - the job market is harder now, apparently because of AI - environmental concerns due to data centers - the ethical issues with scraping people's copyright data to power AI - slop overwhelming the Internet, fake videos all over tiktok that seem real - safety issues like AI psychosis The world is hard right now, and a lot of the things that make it hard seem to intersect in all sorts of ways with the way AI is being developed, run, and used. If you solve one of those issues, you still haven't solved the other ones.
- krackers 5mo ago
  I don't think AI safety/psychosis/alignment issues are on most people's minds. All of the other ones are basically downstream of AI furthering wealth inequality. Job market for obvious reasons. Environmental concerns are mostly downstream of the fact that cities are suddenly accommodating data centers while they didn't care about promoting growth of infrastructure before, and citizens are asked to foot the electrical/water bills. (People would not care about environmental impacts as much if they weren't immediately impacted, say the DCs were built in Africa). Also missed is the pushback against AI art: the further devaluation of talent, and an associated loss of meaning many people have. I think this is probably still downstream of it threatening jobs though, since people would not react as violently if they could truly treat art as a hobby instead of as a profession.
AnimalMuppet 5mo ago
Speaking just for myself: I hate AI output. I hate it in code, I hate it in prose. It's just off in ways that range from subtle to absolutely blatant. It's wrong in ways that the humans involved (if any) either can't or don't fix. I hate the carelessness of other peoples' time and attention. No, I have no interest in what your AI "thinks" in response to your prompt. If that's what you're doing, just send me the prompt, not the AI output. And I hate the AI companies, not so much because AI is solely in the hands of a few companies, but because they're trying to make it appear so inevitable and once-in-a-lifetime-get-on-it-now-or-be-left-behind-forever that everyone is losing their minds and chasing it like lemmings. I'm against all of it. I actually care about people. Computers are tools; that's all. When the tools make it harder to connect with other humans in a human way, when the contact turns into this weird unnatural garbage where I can't hear the heart of the person on the other side, then computers are bad tools that need to stop being used. (Yes, you could have "corporate speak" that had the same problems, but at least that came at the speed that humans can type. AI lets it flow far faster, fast enough that it drowns out actual human communication. That's a huge loss.)
- potsandpans 5mo ago
  [flagged]
  - kevin948 5mo ago
    No need to be so dismissively pathological. If you disagree, that's one thing, but this reads as 'look at this sad, crazy fool' when this is a pretty understandable reaction to feeling alienated by the way in which LLMs are being forcefully pushed in both personal and professional domains and the oft ensuing breakdown in human to human communication. 'Who does this technology serve?' is a valid question and 'not us' is a valid answer. Sure, the poster's feelings may stem from a 'wider set of technology/tooling', but that doesn't necessarily take from the point. People are sensing that LLM technology is being used as an accelerant for further alienation, whether attributed perfectly to the specific technology or not.
    - 5mo ago
AlexeyBrin 5mo ago
Honest answer: nobody knows. You will need to create a poll large enough of people representing all society and ask the questions. Most people in tech (I include myself here) just speculate and project their own bias on the entire population.
xscott 5mo ago
For me, I'm very enthusiastic about it's use for programming, mathematics, and as a teaching assistant[0]. I'm very worried about it being used for automated surveillance, terrible customer service, and deceptive targeted advertisements. I'm unconcerned about slop and alignment issues. I'm very much in favor of local models (democratization), just like I'm a fan of Wikipedia for making so many topics available to everyone for free. [0] I don't see a lot of people using LLMs to learn a new topic, but I had a really great experience by walking through some math I wanted to know, forcing it to go slowly, and writing code and test cases for each concept to make sure it wasn't hallucinating. There are no "choose your own adventure" textbooks like this, and there are no professors who would be that patient with me in office hours. I don't think it will work well for unmotivated learners.
hackable_sand 5mo ago
For one thing, we were promised AI and we got... a chatbot. So it pretty much starts with the lies and scams. You could argue this is the same cultural force behind NFTs for instance.
- stavros 5mo ago
  What kind of AI were you expecting that wouldn't be "a chatbot"?
  - hackable_sand 5mo ago
    It's hard to say. Perhaps being at the epicenter of Silicon Valley's nouveau AI revolution tinted my glasses. But I remember a distinct air of optimism, that humanity was working towards some breakthrough in the fundamental secrets of consciousness. Let me be frank, it doesn't matter how well the machine works if it is weaponized against people. If it systematically degrades our humanity. I am a pacifist, so I believe in the inherit value of living things. I expected something graceful and beautiful, with unquestionable value to the people interacting with it. Instead Silicon Valley produced slave-humunculi, stunted aberrations of "intelligence". This entire movement is basically a two-faced insult to life. -- That being said, for all the things LLMs are capable of, you could pay a living, breathing person to do, more efficiently, faster, and for cheaper. So the entire effort was for... what?
    - CHB0403085482 5mo ago
      AI on chess https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz5EFsSbQ7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iz5EFsSbQ7U
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    For one thing, I would've expected it to actually have intelligence. All we currently have is a stochastic parrot without any intelligence or ability to reason.
    - 5mo ago
bluefirebrand 5mo ago
> are people against AI Personally, yes. I'm against anything that seems poised to devalue human life
watwut 5mo ago
Imo, tech leaders managed to make themselves seem odious so much, that I am scared of any additional power they will get. If I run Claude at home and it is now source of info and trained to be effective right wing propagandist (most subtle then grok) with no one except new CEO being able to change it, I am scared of it.
porknbeans00 5mo ago
AI to me is very dangerous. And we're throwing it into mission critical shit with reckless abandon. And the operative word there is RECKLESS. It's non deterministic by its nature. Without good frameworks and safeguards it's unpredictable. We know that much for certain. But it's worse than that. We don't know all the attack vectors for prompt escapes yet at all. That's barely been figured out. And the psychological toll of working in slop heavy environments is CLEARLY VERY BAD. So ... we raced a technology out the door without even minimal research into how to do that safely or effectively. As an industry we just shot ourselves in both knees and made the case for a regulatory blow back of epic proportions. And like... That sucks. Complete failure of leadership across the entire industry. Short term gains for short term losses followed by long term losses.
latexr 5mo ago
It’s not a simple A or B. There are plenty of reasons to be against AI, and they can depend on where you live or how you are affected by it. The citizens who just got told they’ll be left without electricity because it’ll be rerouted to a nearby data centre have good reason to be against it. As do the people affected by their noise. People concerned with the environmental impact, the rising prices of consumer hardware, the consolidation of power, their use for surveillance, propaganda, killing, discrimination, the proliferation of AI psychosis, carelessness and loss of skills, loss of jobs without a safety net, erosion of online discourse, increased distrust of scientific papers… The list goes on and on.
binary132 5mo ago
Obviously, young people coming up into a world full of guys like him telling them that AI is going to eat their jobs and refusing to hire them for reasonable wages are not really in favor of specifically that in particular.
- stavros 5mo ago
  Yeah but as far as potential goes, "AI will take your job" isn't that much worse than "you'll be working 12 hours in an Amazon warehouse with a 2 minute pee break for minimum wage". I feel like American society is particularly vulnerable to this, where nobody opposes anything that doesn't affect them personally, which means that resistance to any gradual erosion of liberties is always tiny. You can pass anything you want as long as you do it slowly, because resistance will always be limited to a small segment of the population at a time. It's very "first they came for the communists".

float4 5mo ago

As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?

seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.
- ompogUe 5mo ago
  What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. While I did appreciate having access to stacks of modern computer manuals, it didn't last long: once the mom-and-pops were out of business, the big box stores pivoted to converting half of their floor space to selling candles and pillows.
  - seanmcdirmid 5mo ago
    There was never much money in books, B&N would always make their margins on their cafe and their overprice gifts and toys. Amazon never really made money from books either, and they don't really make it on retail, but the data they get from retail is very valuable and profitable. Borders used to have a beautiful computer book section with a lot of upper end books that you wouldn't find...definitely not find at B&N. It was sad when they went out of business. Amazon has everything but you can't really browse it, and its not like university engineering bookstores and libraries are keeping their books up to date either.
  - zimpenfish 5mo ago
    > What I remember is the big box book stores coming to town and putting the independent and smaller stores out of business. Weirdly, in (central) London, that didn't happen - the smaller stores survived people like Borders et al. The only "big" stores there now are Foyles[0] and Waterstones (who own Foyles.) [0] In its new soulless incarnation.

lioeters 5mo ago

Ex-CEO of Google telling a crowd of young graduates entering society, "You will work for AI." Then trying to counter the boos with remarks like: "If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on." This is not only about AI the technology, it's the deserved anger against the privileged and powerful for their utter mismanagement of society. The youth sees through the bullshit. Good on them, there may be hope for humanity after all.

rvz 5mo ago
The worst part was he was smirking. At this point, people in tech are just as hated as bankers and the general public will see them as their enemies, taking away their job, but this time permanently. Of course he knows there will be a crash in this, so its unsurprising to see this reaction. But the point is, Schmidt does not care either way as he stands to benefit and expects humanity to be paying for the tokens. He is already prepared for the eventual backlash anyway.
foldr 5mo ago
>If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on This doesn't even work as a metaphor. I absolutely would not jump on the chance to ride on a literal rocket ship without asking a hell of a lot of questions first!
- epoxyhockey 5mo ago
  This doesn't even work as a metaphor The whole speech was probably written by AI anyway </sarcasm>
- watwut 5mo ago
  Yeah, that was my first thought too. If I am character in a sci-fi book (and he is old enough to read those), I totally jump on it. But here, back in the real world, with one life to live, majority of people will simply refuse because they have lives and sane interested person asks a lot of questions. I mean, was he one of early Titan submersible passengers? And that one guaranteed quick death rather then prolonged one or slavery or what have you.

ChrisArchitect 5mo ago

More discussion on the linked: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674

tim333 5mo ago
That was about a different speaker, although still booing AI.

tim333 5mo ago

They have the full speech here https://youtu.be/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7968 https://youtu.be/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7968 There's quite a lot less booing vs cheering compared with the linked recording which I guess was done on a phone near some people who didn't like it.

alanwreath 5mo ago
I’m not sure if you were expecting the boo’s to totally drown out the speaker. The audio system for orators in those types of venues are made to focus on the orators voice, not that of the audience. The fact that they were audible at all (they WERE) is to say they were substantial. The fact Schmidt recognized hearing them and from time to time had to pause to make a point means he was speaking through the crowds discontent. It was a good watch - I appreciated hearing the audible boos. I’m not the only one in the room who is concerned about the adoption of AI being overly cavalier without clear evidence it’s even worth it / or that you go to school and are told great now you MUST learn this, your degree choice (your dream) is moot - the message has been “deal with it”. That’s not to say there isn’t already plenty evidence online that supports the thought, but hearing it from a college campus audience makes me think about what my son is going into right now, that my concern is real. I’m torn really because I am already benefitting from the tools provided. I can see their utility. And, though, I actually agree with Schmidt’s overall message - it was truthful and felt genuine, it’s an unfortunate reality. Who’s going to cheer that? So good on him for being naive to that fact or willing to endure an obvious boo fest. AI’s fun but life is more fun. Speed is fun, but so is sitting down for a sec to chat with friends. Maybe the backlash against AI is because we’re still grappling with the onslaught of the internet and smart phones. The unintended negative effects we have yet to solve today (Schmidt even starts his speech referring to them before he brings up AI almost as if to say, “look how well these blunders went, now hold my beer”). Youth and people in general feel robbed, they have become a cog in someone else’s machine and AI doesn’t free you from it - it’s not like businesses are saying “oh excellent! we can get the work done faster, let’s decrease the amount of hours we make people work to get their wage. Let’s let them benefit from this boon of productivity.” No! The opposite, “We will kick you and if you want to stay, be happy you’re here and willing to run in this fever pitch rat race that has just introduced a rapidly increasing devourer that runs behind you.” … “Want weekends!? AI doesn’t, hmm is that the way you ‘demonstrate what it means to be human’?” My mind keeps on thinking that what I am really being told is it’s time to start my own business because I will only ever be the person to give me a weekend off.