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Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches
- cryo32 5mo agoGood. Why wouldn't you boo at a net loss for your own personal security?
- mlnj 5mo agoEspecially the folks who are graduating. All they can see is 'Juniors no longer wanted' and 'Seniors also can count their days' everywhere. Why can't they be as excited as people already invested into Datacenters? /s
- cryptopian 5mo agoI see a few comments on here that read "why is everyone so ungrateful and hysterical about this exciting new technology?" And I don't understand why people are surprised by this. All a young person is going to hear is "We're disrupting the world, automating employment opportunities, automating art and other leisure, innovating misinformation vectors, and also we think this technology might doom humanity. I know we're from the same kinds of companies as the social media giants you already distrust, but still pls give billions of dollars thank"
- jbs789 5mo agoSilicon Valley has really screwed up here. They are so obsessed with their own importance (this kit is so powerful it can destroy the world!) they have failed to sell/inform the average joe. It’s a tool. And the next generation probably benefits from learning how to use it effectively. The hype has gotten in the way of reality.
- _heimdall 5mo agoA good start would have been them not calling this artificial intelligence at all. The hype is largely based on the term "AI" and if it really is simply a (very impressive) auto complete tool it isn't intelligence at all, though as you said can be a very useful tool.
- azan_ 5mo agoIt's amazing that there are people who still believe in "it's just autocomplete". It hasn't been true for a long time, but currently it's position that reveals complete lack of awareness how good AI has become. It has solved Erdos problem using novel approach. Constant moving of goalpost is recurring theme when discussing AI, but it's really impossible to move it so far that you can frame this achievement as "impressive autocomplete".
- _heimdall 5mo agoI would draw a distinction here. If its a tool (as the GP proposed), it is just fancy auto complete. If it isn't a tool and is instead solving problems in novel ways, inventing new things, etc then it is intelligence and not a tool. It can't be both in my opinion. To be a tool it needs to be controllable and predictable, intelligences are neither. See humans, and really all living things, for plenty of examples where they can't be completely controlled or predicted.
- maplethorpe 5mo agoI mean, tokens are passed as input to a model, which then outputs the next most-likely token. At the heart of it, that's the technology right? Why is it so silly to call that autocomplete? Because it's capable of impressive things?
- azan_ 5mo ago> Because it's capable of impressive things? Precisely. Calling it autocomplete when it's capable of completing tasks that have nothing to do with autocomplete is silly. If you want to be consistent with your terminology, you'd have to call any stochastic process "autocomplete". What makes it double silly is that you can't really exclude that human intelligence is a stochastic process.
- Levitz 5mo agoBecause the first three sound completely awesome and the latter two are basically propaganda. "innovating misinformation vectors" and "might doom humanity" are far better descriptors for about every social network out there, or even the internet. These same people would probably riot if social media was made to disappear. As everything regarding college campuses opinion nowadays, it's down to politics. It's not about AI, it's about how this comes in a time in which Silicon Valley is aligning itself with a right-wing government. This explains why when China shows up with progress the news are actually well received, why opposition to data centers aligns itself with left-wing ethos (environmental, minorities) even if it, on its face, has a ridiculous impact on either, why there's more concern for job losses the closer the industry align with the left (Anyone curious about what financial advisors think of AI? No?), why the technology is seemingly at the same time absolutely useless and the end of white collar jobs, and thus a disaster either way, etc etc. There are a lot of real valid concerns, it's an incredibly serious matter, if anything it needs more political attention, but the current discourse is a complete flood of utter idiocy and doesn't deserve respect, nor attention.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo agoI think to most people, "you won't have to work any more" sounds like a good thing, except in our current society, it means "oh by the way, you and your children will starve".
- Levitz 5mo agoYeah I absolutely agree, if you ask me Andrew Yang should be getting calls about every day now, and UBI should be getting mentioned far more, but none of that is happening. Opposing technology has a godawful track record and for some reason there's focus on that rather than tackling the actual problems. I bet that behind closed doors, directives are laughing at college students. Why, they are basically playing misdirection for them! It's fantastic for business.
- UncleMeat 5mo agoThe US can barely agree to fund food stamps for poor people with jobs. And we’ve got the richest man in the world screaming about welfare. The idea that UBI will save us as we aggregate more power and wealth to a few CEOs is a fantasy.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoThey can be hired as Data-Center-Guard against Anti-AI Terrorism soon to come?
- mlnj 5mo agoDon't forget the boom boom collars to prevent thoughts of arson.
- 21asdffdsa12 5mo agoFree housing right above the datacenter- the age of hosting is upon us- host-ages..
- arn3n 5mo agoI would be disappointed if someone took the completion of my degree and the ceremony behind it as an opportunity to push their business. There’s enough advertisements on the internet; We don't need ads in our universities, too.
- camillomiller 5mo agoI think the tech downward spiral is described quite well by the way we went from a historical Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford to this.
- NDlurker 5mo agoI saw Dr. Fauci give a commencement speech over the weekend and was cheered for warning people about the massive increase in misinformation/disinformation, how AI is enabling it, and that they need to use their critical thinking skills when confronted with it.
- nxm 5mo agoFauci’s on the last people who should be schooling people about misinformation
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- daveguy 5mo ago[flagged]
- chilmers 5mo agoAnd I’ll bet you can cite us a whole list of Rogan podcasts explaining why, eh?
- SadErn 5mo ago- "Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely, entirely and completely incorrect. The NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain-of-function research in the Wuhan Institute of Virology." - "There's no reason to be walking around with a mask." - "The accusation being circulated that I influenced the scientists to change their minds by bribing them with millions of dollars in grant money is absolutely false and simply preposterous." - "When you get vaccinated, you not only protect your own health and that of the family but also you contribute to the community health by preventing the spread of the virus throughout the community. In other words, you become a dead end to the virus. And when there are a lot of dead ends around, the virus is not going to go anywhere."
- 10xDev 5mo ago[flagged]
- Havoc 5mo agoNoticing it more on YouTube too - scripts that are definitely AI. Tons of it’s not z it’s y
- 10xDev 5mo agoI wouldn't be surprised if AI is also influencing how people talk/write. I felt like I used it is not x it is y a couple of times recently and not sure whether I am just being more aware of it or if it is becoming a part of my own writing pattern because of LLMs.
- sitkack 5mo agoI don't think this person was trolling when in conversation they said "load-bearing" and "real". It is AI brain rot.
- JPC21 5mo agoI noticed something similar. Phrases I have noticed that Claude likes using are "... is doing major work ..." and "... worth pulling apart ...". Unfortunately, some of these have subconsciously become part of my own writing style as I noticed recently. English is not my mother tongue, so I'm pretty sure that I inherited these from Claude.
- esseph 5mo agoCome in without a login / cookies. It's like 60-70% AI now. It's crazy!
- IshKebab 5mo agoNot actually what this is about (but I was hoping it was because that'd be hilarious).
- muglug 5mo agoI’m reasonably certain that Schmidt anticipated that reaction after the first speaker was booed. It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
- keybored 5mo agoIt isn’t every day that Big Tech execs get to hear the truth of everyperson sentiment.
- daveguy 5mo agoYeah, maybe they should listen for once. Every indie developer should be working to get people off the big tech slop treadmill.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> Every indie developer should be working to get people off the big tech slop treadmill. And what exactly are we supposed to do? Just try to ship alternatives to big tech slop? Actively try to work against them? Publish cracked software so they stop earning money? Genuinely asking, as I'm not sure sure indie developers are the ones who should try to work against these enormous corporations, it's typically the job of the government to ensure society works and is fair, but they seem to currently be on the side of big tech, so indie developers can't realistically do anything about it, unless I'm missing what you're asking for here.
- daveguy 5mo agoAgreed. The most effective efforts aren't going to come from indie developers. They aren't software issues, more regulatory. Busting up big tech into "baby bells" is the number one thing that needs to be done. But now that we have essentially "boilerplate for free", I hope the degoogle/demeta/etc and self-hosted efforts are boosted in a way that even my mom can migrate away without much trouble. But that'll probably take real AI and not slop based addiction machines.
- seltzerboys 5mo agomy best friend is a high school english teacher. he said the worst part is kids keep hearing 'it's inevitable,' the complete integration of AI into every facet of life and thinking is gonna happen no matter what anyone says or does. this is the most manipulative and untrue thing anyone could say to a kid scared of a certain kind of future. its it's own kind of misinformation to tell people that something that will take an exorbitant amount of man power, coordination, resourcing, and experimentation to execute on is 'inevitable.' he also said the people who argue it's inevitable are always the ones with a profit motive lol, which i disagree with only because in tech many people who have an anti-profit motive also say it's inevitable.
- piva00 5mo agoIn my 20+ years of career it has definitely felt the most tyrannical rollout of a technology I ever experienced. Every other world-transforming technology I got in contact with was more organic: the personal computer, the internet, high-speed internet, the smartphone, all of those followed the usual adoption curve. Even technical tools like cloud computing which carried a bit of the anxiety from execs about "being left behind" was much more organic. AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it. I sincerely cannot wait until this phase of it bursts, I want to see what's on the other side because right now this side kinda sucks even though I have uses for the technology itself.
- ngruhn 5mo agoExtremely sober take. And rare. Couldn't agree more.
- cryptopian 5mo agoTo some extent, I also think the global mood around Silicon Valley has soured. I remember just starting university when Facebook was taking off in the UK, and there was genuine buzz and excitement around being able to keep up with all your old friends. Years marched on and we started to uncover all the problems with social media, and their carelessness around their own impacts to society, so most people I know who were excited in 2010 were desperately finding ways not to be there. Now, a different handful of San Francisco companies are asking for lots of money to disrupt society, and I'm just not interested.
- damnitbuilds 5mo ago[flagged]
- LtWorf 5mo agoI'm sorry, can you explain what the link with "woke" is in this video?
- seltzerboys 5mo agodisagreeing with something is part of discourse? booing is a practice as old as the practice of giving lectures in front of an audience. there's nothing 'newfangled' or 'woke' or 'scary' about booing something.
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- damnitbuilds 5mo agoNo, booing is not what is wrong. I might myself boo at someone trying to glorify an AI-led future. What is wrong is reporting the new student politics without the appropriate derision for the simplistic, biased views of students, and not condemning their simplistic, biased professors who inculcate only those biased views, who no longer teach students to respect and investigate other views, who instead teach them to violently deny people the right to air other views on campus.
- LtWorf 5mo agoWho tells you their views are simplistic? There's only so much you can articulate while being a random person in a crowd and not a millionaire who can spread his ideas as much as he wants.
- damnitbuilds 5mo agoPeople used to treat angry-student politics and the views of the noisiest, angriest students with the correct amount of derision. That stopped ( as seen here ). And, worse, social media has let those angry students drive debate, which has led to the rise of the hateful woke. And, still worse, students are no longer being educated to be critical but to accept one side and hate the other.
- keybored 5mo agoReporter: “Seems to have struck a nerve” The Tech Powers That Be has told these young adults that AI will disrupt the job market that they are entering. Maybe decimate white collar work. Granted, maybe this was mostly a few years ago because the ecstatic celebration among the cream of the crop of the parasites seems to have cooled down, maybe because they figured out that telling everyone in office jobs that their tech was supposed to make their lives worse was a bad strategy. But still, that was a narrative that has stuck. So these kinds of people drill that non-consentual thought into young adults’ brain. Then the same kind come to their office job graduation ceremony and take the opportunity to hype AI? Yeah, they struck a nerve that they manufactured themselves. Two possible conclusions to draw from that. 1. Their social brains are so atrophried and withered from the daily sycophancy (occupational hazard of being very high up on the corporate ladder) that they honestly thought that grads would be happy about AI disrupting the job market (the commoners love when stocks go up?) 2. Signalling to investors that AI Is Still Happening at every damn opportunity is more important than pissing off the people you are supposed to give an inspirational speech to
- va1a 5mo agoI've noticed, as a student, that many college students - particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost. I understand the disdain for trying to inject the concept everywhere, and like any new technology, it's apt to be used where it is unneeded, and mentioned when it is irrelevant. But this luddite-like hatred needs also to be addressed. You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up. Students need to learn to use it more than constantly boo and ignore it. Especially those in non-STEM fields, where its usage might be more optional currently.
- phito 5mo agoI use AI a lot for development, but I am not sure why students should "embrace" the new technology made to take the job they are studying for.
- breezybottom 5mo agoYou do realize luddites were people made unemployable and impoverished by new technology? Calling them luddites just proves their point.
- SadErn 5mo ago[dead]
- mike_hearn 5mo agoThey weren't made unemployable nor impoverished. Many migrated to the cities and worked in the factories. Their complaints were more about the move from being an artisan to being manual labor.
- actionfromafar 5mo ago"Yes, and", to see young children literally worked to death, getting crushed in machines. They were against that. And people were impoverished, as can be seen in the drop of life expectancy until labour laws were enacted. Edit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36335796/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36335796/
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- Sol- 5mo ago200 years ago people would have booed the industrial revolution. They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits.
- sevenzero 5mo agoTurns out the industrial revolution doomed us for short term luxury in the grand scheme of things.
- StevenWaterman 5mo agoI agree with your premise, but let's not pretend we did a good job equitably distributing the benefits of the industrial revolution
- nathanaldensr 5mo agoNot everyone characterizes AI as "liberation from toil," and many are skeptical that any "equitable distribution of benefits" will occur in the first place. That's the point.
- dude250711 5mo agoIn France and Russia there also had been revolutions. They have found a way to distribute.
- embedding-shape 5mo ago> They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil Come on, we're all adults and well-aware that if companies find a way to make people more productive, it just means they'll expect more, not that we'll get more free-time.
- Sol- 5mo agoBoth sides are at fault here, no? A consumer could work part-time and live as well or even much better as someone 50 years ago, but they largely don't want to. I do concede of course that housing is a bit limiting factor here and my "just adapt your lifestyle" doesn't fully hold.
- oompydoompy74 5mo agoWarms my heart. Tech executives and politicians need to be put in their place.
- tamimio 5mo ago>AI will take your job!! >AI will lower your wages!! >AI will be used to track you!! >AI will surveil you and profile you like never before!! Then they get surprised why they get booed. Even personally, I don’t think I met any person IRL that sees AI in a positive way. The only people who cheer for it are the techbros-AI-wrappers who want to sell you some slop SaaS, or the ones who benefit from its market manipulation and price gouging.
- camillomiller 5mo agoThese people are so high on their own farts they completely lost the ability to think outside of their billionaires bubbles
- deleted 5mo ago[deleted]
- d4rkp4ttern 5mo agoI can see where it's coming from. Putting it starkly, at a high level, the broad effect of AI is this: devaluation of expertise, whether in coding, or drawing, or music composition, or writing, or translation, or so many other areas. College students working hard to gain expertise in specific areas are faced with the prospect that this very expertise is being "democratized" by AI, putting it in the hands of literally anyone. Sure, true expertise is still needed to "validate" (and train) the AI, etc, etc, but that's a small consolation. Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.
- snowwrestler 5mo agoNo, expertise is more important when working with AI, because it can make mistakes. Expertise is the ability to predict, understand, and mitigate such mistakes. In science for example, anyone can do an experiment about gravity. In fact millions of high school kids do every year. What makes an expert scientist is the ability to understand all the many ways such experiments can fail to accurately measure the underlying reality. Or consider an AI writing a press release. A PR expert will catch nuances of wording that will confuse readers, or leave fodder for others to attack or mischaracterize the announcement. College students know this because they are working with AI. And what makes them mad is the human-driven false notion that AI devalues expertise. AI looks like magic to non-experts. But it’s not, it’s more like a “junior engineer” or “PR intern” to people with actual expertise to evaluate its output.
- vitally3643 5mo agoYou and I know this. The people making hiring decisions do not. Managers and CEOs are too enamored by the thought of reduced labor costs to see reason. Facts don't matter, only what the person making the hiring decision believes to be true, or has been fed. College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is, the hysteria is what is causing problems.
- 5mo ago
- dfxm12 5mo agoIt really highlights the disconnect between these executives and reality.
- metalman 5mo agoThe kids are alright! "AI" is so bad that people dont have the time to hate it directly, and there lives are such that pragmatism forces them to identify exactly what the source of the problems in the world is,well at least when it stands up and blithers out loud strait at them.
- thinkingemote 5mo agoThere is a dissonance here, can anyone help. It's weird. Doesnt anyone else see this? To me it feels like an anti-fur protest by people who themselves are wearing fur coats. Why don't we see news of academics happy that their students have made the u-turn they want? I thought the outcry against AI was from the universities themselves because the students have all happily embraced it and were using it all the time? But now the outcry seems to be by the students themselves? Are these different students? Maybe: they seem to be about to leave education instead of using it to pass their exams. They have got their certificates. If they are the same students, maybe it's about their use of AI? Perhaps the reaction is a kind of psychological effect of their use, an effect of shame or guilt? Or maybe its not about their personal use but about a wider adoption by other people and the change in the world around them? They don't see their own use of AI as relevant. Maybe its about the news stories? They all seem to be hype. Or perhaps it's a fashionable topic for the latest small protest movement? its news because its new, but its not a widespread movement or is it? Is it more like an anti-car protest by people who are forced to use cars and cant use public transport? So: Will we see the reduction of use by students on their work, and a kind of happiness by the academics on how their students want to learn properly?
- winfredJa 5mo agoyou are overthinking. most of these students had hard time getting a job or didn't get a job yet. they have 100K+ loan to pay. only thing AI has successfully done so far is replacing human labor.
- thinkingemote 5mo agoYes its more difficult now they are not students. Would you say that the same students who are protesting AI have used AI to graduate? Its ok either way. Edits - condensing the questions: 1) Are these protests reflective of the majority of students? 2) Do the majority of students use LLMs regularly in education? Given the above questions what change in education and change in personal AI use might we see?
- 5mo ago
- rglover 5mo agoWatching people push this stuff like this (in the face of clear public disapproval) feels like watching Uncut Gems. You can tell that they know the music is about to stop and they're all desperate to find a chair. They didn't update their playbook for the next generation and now their cards are showing. Short-term: oh boy. Long-term: phew.
- mnmnmn 5mo agoThis is so so good
- ChrisArchitect 5mo agoRelated: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674