7 ms·

Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

122 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

kspetkov79 6mo ago
[flagged]
- garciasn 6mo ago
  There are a lot of differences in what is allowed in a post-secondary education setting that are the diametric opposite in the working world. You are in an education setting to learn HOW things work and how to think critically. In the workplace, you are doing work w/whatever tools you have at your disposal to get it done fast and well. You aren't supposed to use a search engine or a reference manual to find the answers to a problem on a test, but how many of us relied on those for our day-to-day work? While I understand what you're trying to say here, they're just not comparable scenarios.
  - everdrive 6mo ago
    I think you're agreeing with the parent comment more than you think; the skills needed to excel at school are in a lot of cases quite oblique to the skills needed to excel in the working world. At least when I was young, no one was able to articulate to me just how little of the rigamarole at school would be totally unnecessary in the working world, and the transition was quite a surprise for me. A few high-level differences: - There has never been a time in my entire working career -- ever, where I could not reference something or look it up. What matters is that I know the concepts; I'm _always_ allowed (in fact, encouraged) to double check and reference my facts. - If I dislike a topic in front of me, I can expend effort and do something else. For instance, one my first "real" jobs was working in the Apple store. You could either do repairs or take in broken computers. One role was critical thinking, the other was customer service. If you were an excellent tech, they would make you do the customer service bit far less often. But you can't get out of writing English essays in school by excelling in mathematics. - In school you receive instruction for a long period of time and then are asked to recall and analyze what you've learned. But, there is no real recursive mechanism for learning your craft; if you need to take apart a macbook 5-10 times a day, you'll develop real expertise. And there will really be no penalty to being initially poor at the task. Nothing in school really works this way; you never approach any topic in depth, and you don't get real practice -- you just get a test which is a distance enough behavioral reward mechanism that it cannot really reinforce the neural pathways. I understand that this is a bit oblique to LLMs, but I think LLMS map the same way. Do I need to know how to write a python script? Not really ... the LLM just does it for me. And the job only cares that it works, they really don't care that the work is elegant. I understand _why_ you would want kids to really learn the process -- this is a special time in their life where time and energy is set aside just for learning. But, the lessons they see from the real world really do clash with the ideals pushed and hoped for by teachers and administrators. When they get a job, they can actually just let the LLM do a bunch of the work.
brcmthrowaway 6mo ago
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.
- mkw5053 6mo ago
  I believe Anthropic has stopped hiring junior and mid eng. So if they're an indication of what's the come (or is already here)
  - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
    They are a business, and not an outreach program. Note NVIDIA is engaged in questionable operations that must end... sooner or later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM Unfortunately, the economic fallout will impact kids hardest. =3
- delecti 6mo ago
  Yep. I was looking for jobs the other day (because the market as a whole is kinda cooked), and one fairly small company had a half-dozen openings for Staff level engineers, and nothing else. If I'm having this much trouble with staff level experience, I can't imagine how new grads are doing.
  - sheikhnbake 6mo ago
    Not great. There's so much competition for so few entry-level positions.
  - Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
    Check your schools alumni jobs board postings, and have a look at local telecom offerings. Few will want to spend $50k in resources to train knowing you will jump to a better job in 1 year. These people have been around a long time, and may be able to get you started: https://www.aerotek.com/ https://www.aerotek.com/ Would also recommend talking with companies you find interesting at local trade-shows. Don't get lazy with the online gauntlet of Ads for awful jobs, scams, and AI datasets. Best of luck, =3
ethanplant 6mo ago
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”.
- dfxm12 6mo ago
  The executive class is out of touch with normal society.
  - onetokeoverthe 6mo ago
    [dead]
- nephihaha 6mo ago
  They're baffled maybe because they stand to benefit, whereas most of the audience won't.
- mbgerring 6mo ago
  The people who are faced with this question are so far removed from the idea that losing your job means not being able to eat or pay rent that it seems pointless to ask them. Whenever I try to get serious answers to this question I get far-future projections about how much better people’s lives will be in the aggregate, at some point in the future, on the assumption that their baseless, faith-based projections about AI materialize. They literally do not care if their own neighbors starve, or become homeless, or lose any ability to plan their own lives more than a few days in advance. This is the predictable result of the deep inculcation of spreadsheet-based “utilitarianism,” frequently paired with heavy drug use and paranoia-inducing science fiction horror stories, that certain communities of Bay Area tech workers were exposed to (inducted into, groomed into, whatever word you want to use) in the last decade or so. This toxic soup taught many people that individual lives literally do not matter when weighed against the importance of creating AGI. This set of beliefs already has a body count, and it will grow before this train crashes.
booleandilemma 6mo ago
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.
- jstanley 6mo ago
  We've done this dozens of times before. In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them. In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity.
  - littlexsparkee 6mo ago
    everyone? this is pure conjecture and cold comfort for anyone early/mid career
  - dmbche 6mo ago
    When is the productivity showing up?
    - jstanley 6mo ago
      If productivity doesn't increase then you don't need to worry about displaced workers.
      - throwaway27448 6mo ago
        And if productivity does increase, how are we supposed to force the recipients of this productivity to care about the rest of us? It's not like investment has panned out with its promises of general return in any of our lifetimes
      - happytoexplain 6mo ago
palmotea 6mo ago
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.
- perching_aix 6mo ago
  @palmotea: Doesn't matter. We're finally close to realizing the dream of making labor obsolete, or nearly so. Most of those kids are no longer needed, and thankfully those that are still needed can be paid more reasonable wages (lower ones). Who's gonna buy the products and services provided by automated labor? What will prevent a hyperinflation, making savings evaporate? Or do you further envision a mass genocide of the poor to go along with this?
  - palmotea 6mo ago
    > Or do you further envision a mass genocide of the poor to go along with this? When their savings are exhausted, the problem will have a way of "taking care of itself." No gas chambers, no guns, just capitalism.
    - perching_aix 6mo ago
      @palmotea: When their savings are exhausted, the problem will have a way of "taking care of itself." No gas chambers, no guns, just capitalism. No conflicts and uprisings? Are you sure? History would suggest people don't go down without a fight.
      - palmotea 6mo ago
        > No conflicts and uprisings? Are you sure? History would suggest people don't go down without a fight. Uprising will soon be a thing of the past. We have cheap kill-drones now, and soon they'll be AI powered.
Mordisquitos 6mo ago
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.
- topspin 6mo ago
  The instinctual reaction of Gloria Caufield when she got booed at UCF was to characterize the "issue" as "bipolar"; invoking mental health terminology. Schmidt called his AI future "democratization." Don't be antidemocratic, kids! Since then, the media narrative throughout the reporting has been about "anxiety" and "fear". One might hope that folks can see the time-honored patterns here. This isn't new. It's just not frequently experienced by those that have earned degrees.
rybosworld 6mo ago
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.
- bawolff 6mo ago
  > If AI continues to improve at the pace that it has been, why would anyone hire a human to do the thinking? Sure, but that is the big if, right? It seems unlikely to me that AI will continue at this rate indefinitely. Every technology eventually hits limits.
  - thrance 6mo ago
    It "just" has to reach human-levels, which I won't rule out entirely as being achievable.
- seanw444 6mo ago
  > 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. You don't even need to be a believer in the technology to be concerned. All that matters is that the people with all the money perceive some positive outcome for their wallets from all this investment and AI hype. That is where they'll put their money. Whether or not it ends bad or good. The economy has been reshaped around a hope. Either the hope is false and the economy tanks, or the hope is realized and jobs disappear. Lose-lose.
- reducesuffering 6mo ago
  Exactly. If the AI owner class actually want anyone to believe that AI will bring jobs and prosperity, then people will want to see a little of that in action? You can't say "AI will bring even better jobs for you!" when all that's observed is 20% layoffs every single week.
throwaway27448 6mo ago
Who thought it was a good idea to involve AI into a commencement speech? Talk about showing contempt to the graduates!
- analog31 6mo ago
  Who thought it was a good idea to invite a billionaire?
- joezydeco 6mo ago
  There's a bit of hypocrisy going on as well. Are you sure 100% of those kids in the crowd never touched AI to help them with an assignment or fake their way through a homework? The feeling I get right now is that we're happy to use the assist when necessary, but hate being told it will replace you completely.
  - happytoexplain 6mo ago
    "100%" is a meaningless bar. >we're happy to use the assist when necessary, but hate being told it will replace you completely There is absolutely no hypocrisy in this, and that's even before this adjustment to reality: Usage != happy to use.
jcranmer 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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
- joe_mamba 6mo ago
  [flagged]
  - littlexsparkee 6mo ago
    I wouldn't write it off so quickly, history is not finished. To capitulate so easily, you hand them their victory.
    - joe_mamba 6mo ago
      [flagged]
  - habinero 6mo ago
    Peddle your weird conspiracy think somewhere else, please.
    - joe_mamba 6mo ago
      [flagged]
      - DonHopkins 6mo ago
        [flagged]
        joe_mamba 6mo ago
        [flagged]
evil-olive 6mo ago
> “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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt
- breakpointalpha 6mo ago
  U of Arizona graduated roughly 10,000 students this weekend. Schmidt could have paid off every student loan for every graduate in full and not even noticed it as a rounding error in his net worth. Would have done so much more for humanity that this vapid speech.
  - stogot 6mo ago
    fact that universities admin think this speaker was a good choice also shows how out of touch admin has been
    - frm88 6mo ago
      Plural. The fact that the multiple universities admins think it a good idea to invite those speakers shows how out of touch a whole class of people is with society. As of yesterday evening there were three reported booing events on commencement speeches, all having AI as topic. In one case they let AI read out the name of the students to enter the stage for their diploma and the AI forgot a couple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFCNd61FCzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFCNd61FCzY
jdw64 6mo ago
>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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
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 6mo ago
> “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.
- cindyllm 6mo ago
  [dead]
- glitchc 6mo ago
  But they are learning to practice, at least in some of the courses (others are focused on much-needed theory). It's like forcing students to write code by hand because using an editor would give away too much. And I know first-hand that CS education used to do precisely this as I have proctored such exams myself. What needs a rethink is how education, especially CS education, is imparted given the existence of these tools.
  - FloorEgg 6mo ago
    > What needs a rethink is how education, especially CS education, is imparted given the existence of these tools. This is true of most of the education system. It all needs a rethink.
  - glitchc 6mo ago
    *by hand I mean hand-written on a piece of paper.
- FloorEgg 6mo ago
  Knowledge can be transferred but understanding has to be earned from experience (doing something and getting some sort of feedback). LLMs are commoditizing knowledge, qnd the result will be a relative increase in the value of human understanding and skills. Some people may be baffled by the boos because they are so wealthy they lost touch with what it feels like to struggle to create and capture enough value to afford a dignified life. Some people are frustrated by the boos because it represents the failure of the education system to prepare students to thrive in an environment where thriving is very possible if you have the right attitude and skills. Personally, I'm frustrated because many of these students are being sabotaged by the media they consume, and the education system is not equiped to deal with the deep pessimism or prepare students for the new ways to create and capture value.
amanaplanacanal 6mo ago
Billionaires greasing the tracks to the Butlerian Jihad.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
ChrisArchitect 6mo ago
[dupe] The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188310 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 Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 An AI Hate Wave Is Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318
Garlef 6mo ago
"Do you guys not have phones?"
1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago
Are "tech" workers pawns in the game
soundworlds 6mo ago
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-skepticism-climbs.aspx 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.

122 points by 1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

kspetkov79 6mo ago

[flagged]

garciasn 6mo ago
There are a lot of differences in what is allowed in a post-secondary education setting that are the diametric opposite in the working world. You are in an education setting to learn HOW things work and how to think critically. In the workplace, you are doing work w/whatever tools you have at your disposal to get it done fast and well. You aren't supposed to use a search engine or a reference manual to find the answers to a problem on a test, but how many of us relied on those for our day-to-day work? While I understand what you're trying to say here, they're just not comparable scenarios.
- everdrive 6mo ago
  I think you're agreeing with the parent comment more than you think; the skills needed to excel at school are in a lot of cases quite oblique to the skills needed to excel in the working world. At least when I was young, no one was able to articulate to me just how little of the rigamarole at school would be totally unnecessary in the working world, and the transition was quite a surprise for me. A few high-level differences: - There has never been a time in my entire working career -- ever, where I could not reference something or look it up. What matters is that I know the concepts; I'm _always_ allowed (in fact, encouraged) to double check and reference my facts. - If I dislike a topic in front of me, I can expend effort and do something else. For instance, one my first "real" jobs was working in the Apple store. You could either do repairs or take in broken computers. One role was critical thinking, the other was customer service. If you were an excellent tech, they would make you do the customer service bit far less often. But you can't get out of writing English essays in school by excelling in mathematics. - In school you receive instruction for a long period of time and then are asked to recall and analyze what you've learned. But, there is no real recursive mechanism for learning your craft; if you need to take apart a macbook 5-10 times a day, you'll develop real expertise. And there will really be no penalty to being initially poor at the task. Nothing in school really works this way; you never approach any topic in depth, and you don't get real practice -- you just get a test which is a distance enough behavioral reward mechanism that it cannot really reinforce the neural pathways. I understand that this is a bit oblique to LLMs, but I think LLMS map the same way. Do I need to know how to write a python script? Not really ... the LLM just does it for me. And the job only cares that it works, they really don't care that the work is elegant. I understand _why_ you would want kids to really learn the process -- this is a special time in their life where time and energy is set aside just for learning. But, the lessons they see from the real world really do clash with the ideals pushed and hoped for by teachers and administrators. When they get a job, they can actually just let the LLM do a bunch of the work.

brcmthrowaway 6mo ago

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.

mkw5053 6mo ago
I believe Anthropic has stopped hiring junior and mid eng. So if they're an indication of what's the come (or is already here)
- Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
  They are a business, and not an outreach program. Note NVIDIA is engaged in questionable operations that must end... sooner or later. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM Unfortunately, the economic fallout will impact kids hardest. =3
delecti 6mo ago
Yep. I was looking for jobs the other day (because the market as a whole is kinda cooked), and one fairly small company had a half-dozen openings for Staff level engineers, and nothing else. If I'm having this much trouble with staff level experience, I can't imagine how new grads are doing.
- sheikhnbake 6mo ago
  Not great. There's so much competition for so few entry-level positions.
- Joel_Mckay 6mo ago
  Check your schools alumni jobs board postings, and have a look at local telecom offerings. Few will want to spend $50k in resources to train knowing you will jump to a better job in 1 year. These people have been around a long time, and may be able to get you started: https://www.aerotek.com/ https://www.aerotek.com/ Would also recommend talking with companies you find interesting at local trade-shows. Don't get lazy with the online gauntlet of Ads for awful jobs, scams, and AI datasets. Best of luck, =3

ethanplant 6mo ago

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”.

dfxm12 6mo ago
The executive class is out of touch with normal society.
- onetokeoverthe 6mo ago
  [dead]
nephihaha 6mo ago
They're baffled maybe because they stand to benefit, whereas most of the audience won't.
mbgerring 6mo ago
The people who are faced with this question are so far removed from the idea that losing your job means not being able to eat or pay rent that it seems pointless to ask them. Whenever I try to get serious answers to this question I get far-future projections about how much better people’s lives will be in the aggregate, at some point in the future, on the assumption that their baseless, faith-based projections about AI materialize. They literally do not care if their own neighbors starve, or become homeless, or lose any ability to plan their own lives more than a few days in advance. This is the predictable result of the deep inculcation of spreadsheet-based “utilitarianism,” frequently paired with heavy drug use and paranoia-inducing science fiction horror stories, that certain communities of Bay Area tech workers were exposed to (inducted into, groomed into, whatever word you want to use) in the last decade or so. This toxic soup taught many people that individual lives literally do not matter when weighed against the importance of creating AGI. This set of beliefs already has a body count, and it will grow before this train crashes.

booleandilemma 6mo ago

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.

jstanley 6mo ago
We've done this dozens of times before. In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them. In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity.
- littlexsparkee 6mo ago
  everyone? this is pure conjecture and cold comfort for anyone early/mid career
- dmbche 6mo ago
  When is the productivity showing up?
  - jstanley 6mo ago
    If productivity doesn't increase then you don't need to worry about displaced workers.
    - throwaway27448 6mo ago
      And if productivity does increase, how are we supposed to force the recipients of this productivity to care about the rest of us? It's not like investment has panned out with its promises of general return in any of our lifetimes
    - happytoexplain 6mo ago

palmotea 6mo ago

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.

perching_aix 6mo ago
@palmotea: Doesn't matter. We're finally close to realizing the dream of making labor obsolete, or nearly so. Most of those kids are no longer needed, and thankfully those that are still needed can be paid more reasonable wages (lower ones). Who's gonna buy the products and services provided by automated labor? What will prevent a hyperinflation, making savings evaporate? Or do you further envision a mass genocide of the poor to go along with this?
- palmotea 6mo ago
  > Or do you further envision a mass genocide of the poor to go along with this? When their savings are exhausted, the problem will have a way of "taking care of itself." No gas chambers, no guns, just capitalism.
  - perching_aix 6mo ago
    @palmotea: When their savings are exhausted, the problem will have a way of "taking care of itself." No gas chambers, no guns, just capitalism. No conflicts and uprisings? Are you sure? History would suggest people don't go down without a fight.
    - palmotea 6mo ago
      > No conflicts and uprisings? Are you sure? History would suggest people don't go down without a fight. Uprising will soon be a thing of the past. We have cheap kill-drones now, and soon they'll be AI powered.

Mordisquitos 6mo ago

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.

topspin 6mo ago
The instinctual reaction of Gloria Caufield when she got booed at UCF was to characterize the "issue" as "bipolar"; invoking mental health terminology. Schmidt called his AI future "democratization." Don't be antidemocratic, kids! Since then, the media narrative throughout the reporting has been about "anxiety" and "fear". One might hope that folks can see the time-honored patterns here. This isn't new. It's just not frequently experienced by those that have earned degrees.

rybosworld 6mo ago

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.

bawolff 6mo ago
> If AI continues to improve at the pace that it has been, why would anyone hire a human to do the thinking? Sure, but that is the big if, right? It seems unlikely to me that AI will continue at this rate indefinitely. Every technology eventually hits limits.
- thrance 6mo ago
  It "just" has to reach human-levels, which I won't rule out entirely as being achievable.
seanw444 6mo ago
> 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. You don't even need to be a believer in the technology to be concerned. All that matters is that the people with all the money perceive some positive outcome for their wallets from all this investment and AI hype. That is where they'll put their money. Whether or not it ends bad or good. The economy has been reshaped around a hope. Either the hope is false and the economy tanks, or the hope is realized and jobs disappear. Lose-lose.
reducesuffering 6mo ago
Exactly. If the AI owner class actually want anyone to believe that AI will bring jobs and prosperity, then people will want to see a little of that in action? You can't say "AI will bring even better jobs for you!" when all that's observed is 20% layoffs every single week.

throwaway27448 6mo ago

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

analog31 6mo ago
Who thought it was a good idea to invite a billionaire?
joezydeco 6mo ago
There's a bit of hypocrisy going on as well. Are you sure 100% of those kids in the crowd never touched AI to help them with an assignment or fake their way through a homework? The feeling I get right now is that we're happy to use the assist when necessary, but hate being told it will replace you completely.
- happytoexplain 6mo ago
  "100%" is a meaningless bar. >we're happy to use the assist when necessary, but hate being told it will replace you completely There is absolutely no hypocrisy in this, and that's even before this adjustment to reality: Usage != happy to use.

jcranmer 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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

joe_mamba 6mo ago
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- littlexsparkee 6mo ago
  I wouldn't write it off so quickly, history is not finished. To capitulate so easily, you hand them their victory.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
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- habinero 6mo ago
  Peddle your weird conspiracy think somewhere else, please.
  - joe_mamba 6mo ago
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    - DonHopkins 6mo ago
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      - joe_mamba 6mo ago
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evil-olive 6mo ago

> “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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

breakpointalpha 6mo ago
U of Arizona graduated roughly 10,000 students this weekend. Schmidt could have paid off every student loan for every graduate in full and not even noticed it as a rounding error in his net worth. Would have done so much more for humanity that this vapid speech.
- stogot 6mo ago
  fact that universities admin think this speaker was a good choice also shows how out of touch admin has been
  - frm88 6mo ago
    Plural. The fact that the multiple universities admins think it a good idea to invite those speakers shows how out of touch a whole class of people is with society. As of yesterday evening there were three reported booing events on commencement speeches, all having AI as topic. In one case they let AI read out the name of the students to enter the stage for their diploma and the AI forgot a couple: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFCNd61FCzY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFCNd61FCzY

jdw64 6mo ago

>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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

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 6mo ago

> “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.

cindyllm 6mo ago
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glitchc 6mo ago
But they are learning to practice, at least in some of the courses (others are focused on much-needed theory). It's like forcing students to write code by hand because using an editor would give away too much. And I know first-hand that CS education used to do precisely this as I have proctored such exams myself. What needs a rethink is how education, especially CS education, is imparted given the existence of these tools.
- FloorEgg 6mo ago
  > What needs a rethink is how education, especially CS education, is imparted given the existence of these tools. This is true of most of the education system. It all needs a rethink.
- glitchc 6mo ago
  *by hand I mean hand-written on a piece of paper.
FloorEgg 6mo ago
Knowledge can be transferred but understanding has to be earned from experience (doing something and getting some sort of feedback). LLMs are commoditizing knowledge, qnd the result will be a relative increase in the value of human understanding and skills. Some people may be baffled by the boos because they are so wealthy they lost touch with what it feels like to struggle to create and capture enough value to afford a dignified life. Some people are frustrated by the boos because it represents the failure of the education system to prepare students to thrive in an environment where thriving is very possible if you have the right attitude and skills. Personally, I'm frustrated because many of these students are being sabotaged by the media they consume, and the education system is not equiped to deal with the deep pessimism or prepare students for the new ways to create and capture value.

amanaplanacanal 6mo ago

Billionaires greasing the tracks to the Butlerian Jihad.

deleted 6mo ago

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ChrisArchitect 6mo ago

[dupe] The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188310 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188310 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 Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 An AI Hate Wave Is Here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318

Garlef 6mo ago

"Do you guys not have phones?"

1vuio0pswjnm7 6mo ago

Are "tech" workers pawns in the game

soundworlds 6mo ago

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-skepticism-climbs.aspx 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.