Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches
nbcnews.com
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devaluation of expertise,
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.
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.
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.
The core demoralizing fact is that when people perceive that AI can give results at least as good as human experts, they choose AI, because it is faster and/or cheaper.
I doubt it. If there was nothing behind the hysteria then there would be nothing to be afraid of.
If I was entry level I would be genuinely worried, because hysteria or not, I now have to compete with AI and prove I'm worth hiring. Not an easy thing to do.
So I don't think the anger is about not being able to find a job in the field today, it's about not being able to find one ever.
This can be really frustrating for someone who spent time getting experienced. They get hit twice. First they don't get a chance to do a job because "AI replaced you, sorry". Then they look at the result and what they see is low quality slop.
I'm in a very similar boat! I've had rust on my to-do list for a very long time, but never found the bandwidth in the personal life to actually dig in enough to get proficient. Since AI has come around, I've been able to write a lot of tools in rust and just learn little pieces as I need to. My first couple results were not very great as I didn't know what I was doing, but I've learned enough about structuring good rust apps from the experimentations that I can crank out something pretty decent now.
The AI is so good at holding my hand that it has fundamentally changed how I approach unknown languages and stacks. I used to pick the best stack that I was proficient with for the job. Now I pick the best stack for the job, and become proficient in it. Pretty wild times we live in.
From reading your comment, I suspect you are not becoming as proficient as you might think.
Note that when I say proficient, I in no way mean mastery. It will take years to get to that point. Rust is still one of my weakest languages overall, but I've been surprised at how quickly I've been able to get up to speed with AI assistance.
At this point, nothing I've written with AI is something I don't think I could have written by hand if I had significantly more time to do so.
On a side note, one thing that I have not enjoyed about the Rust community, is a general attitude that rust is hard. I personally find rust to be a whole lot easier than c++ was/is. There's definitely a lot to learn around the ownership model, but it's not rocket science. One of the things I love about Rust is how expressive it is, without compromising on performance and developer empowerment. I'm not implying that this is what you did with your comment as I have no idea what your intentions or thoughts were, just making an observation that this is something I haven't liked.
AI is definitely not a silver bullet for anything, but it has bridged a gap that kept me from diving fully into rust in the past, which is that at the end of the day I need to actually ship something. I learn languages for fun, but also for practical use. A theoretical language that I never use is not interesting to me because it's not useful to me because I can't ship anything with it. AI lets me ship actually useful things for just myself as part of the learning process, and it also gives me a great opportunity to debug Rust code that I know the exact intention of. When trying to clone someone else's project and review or debug that, there's a massive upfront step of understanding what it's supposed to do. When it's my code AI generated, I know what it's supposed to do because the requirements/prompts came from my own mind. That's hugely powerful and something that a lot of other old school developers don't seem to understand yet.
College provides knowledge but never provided expertise. That comes from experience in the real world. Capturable value has always been in the application of knowledge.
Experience will possibly become more valuable as a pipeline of people stop entering many industries. Some of that will be very industry specific in terms of market forces and has still to play out.
People aren’t afraid of being out of a job, they say. It’s the usual jealously guarded guild expertise, by people who haven’t even entered any professions yet.
Why can't they be as excited as people already invested into Datacenters? /s
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.
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.
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.
There may not be a difference there, I don't know but I wouldn't assume that intelligence is nothing more than sufficiently complex auto complete.
I'm not excluding that what we consider intelligence isn't equivalent to autocomplete. Go back and read my last comment, I explicitly left the door open for those two being functionally the same. I was only pointing out that you seemed to be assuming intelligence is fancy auto complete rather than it could be fancy auto complete.
I'm fine with calling any process "autocomplete" if it takes language as input and returns predicted language as output.
I don't feel any need to broaden the definition to include things that have nothing to do with language.
Personally I could see it being either one. The LLM companies have drastically underfunded projects for things like interoperability. As long as inference is a black box we don't know whether its text prediction as a fancy tool or if something crazier has emerged that could be considered intelligent, self aware, conscious, etc. The former is easily assumed by the architecture, the latter seem far fetched but we simply can't know.
To be clear, I completely agree that we'd be better off as a society if they referred to all the LLMs as LLMs, and not as AI, but that's completely antithetical to their intentions and beliefs.
Economics is a study of the past, we won't know what an AI can do economically until it is already released and allowed to directly compete with human labor. There's no safety in such an approach.
This is a bit ranty and not directed at you, to be clear. I just have no patience for how the LLM industry throws around terms at this point, especially OpenAI and Altman.
But an LLM that's able to "economically outcompete most humans at most tasks" (which, IMO, is likely still beyond their potential capability) is not that, and will never be that. They're just trying to have their cake and eat it too by moving the goalposts to 5 yards from the start point and claiming that they're still at the other end of the field. (Not to torturously mix my metaphors or anything.)
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.
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.
As soon as UBI looks like it might happen, legislators will be drafting perverse incentives for themselves and their friends and family.
I agree. And now I'm to trust the same people with even more money and control over global data dissemination? No thanks
It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
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.
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.
I love self-hosting, been doing it myself for quite some time already, and also notice a slight uptick among friends and acquaintances also interested in the same. When it comes to businesses, the ones that didn't already host their data in Europe/EU, are now desperately moving the data, but almost none of them go on-prem/self-hosted, for the typical reasons.
So, while there is a slight uptick, I'm not sure this is the "local stacks" moment, and also not sure that's actually what the public wants. I sometimes dream of setting up a company basically focused on helping people do more self-hosting in various ways, but after looking into it more, I always end up with the feeling that people typically don't actually want self-hosting, most people don't seem to care where the data lives. That'd be such a dream business though, so it's hard to let go of the idea :)
There was a time in which they deserved some respect, as a result of free exchange of ideas among intellectuals. That's far behind by now.
Yes I’d say this is more than representative of “every person” sentiment.
The court of public opinion has no such rules.
If we, the people, see a credible accusation against someone who seems like the type of person who might be guilty of it, we are free to call it like we see it.
Naturally, this can lead to problems: after all, who is "credible" and who "seems like they might be guilty" can be (and very much have been) subject to a lot of bigotry. This is why we have the rules we do in courts of law. But anyone trying to enforce actual legal court rules on public online discussions generally just ends up looking like a jerk.
Blame wealth for making the corruption of the courts too damn obvious. Now they’re not taken seriously.
If you’re so confident it’s a solid way to get ahead, please go ahead and try it yourself.
"So"? The fact that someone is alleged of rape and doesn't lose their invited speech is hardly evidence of injustice. Allegations are not convictions nor proof of guilt.
It seems you are against the presumption of innocence. This presumption is itself a cornerstone of justice, not the opposite.
This is not a legal forum. (In either the literal "this is an internet forum" sense, or the broader "place for discussion" sense.)
If you want to defend your techbro idols of charges far, far too many of their brethren are unquestionably guilty of, you're going to need a stronger argument than "you're not allowed to say you think he's guilty unless a court agrees with you!!"
I think the opposite is true. Accusing someone of rape is often very bad for the accused person, even if the claim is never substantiated. False rape accusations are defamatory.
The public documents said: “He followed me into a shower, slammed me against the wall, and forcibly raped me. I begged him to stop and cried out that he was hurting me, but he ignored my pleas. The next morning, Schmidt attempted to convince me that I enjoyed the assault.”
The point is that student activists handed out flyers about this in advance, so the crowd was aware.
Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.
He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"
And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.
No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".
It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.
And in the specifics of military, it's all nonsense anyway. Reagan pulled it with his dumb space lasers and we ain't got those up there anymore.
The only time it was kind of true was with nuclear weapons between the US and USSR. Both countries very rapidly obtained enough weapons to destroy the other utterly, and were just wasting their money afterwards.
For the smaller states, nuclear weapons have universally been not worth it. The only two "losers" right now are Ukraine and Iran, neither of which would be in the position to use their nuclear weapons had they retained/obtained them.
Anyone who's paid attention to these recent wars has seen the actual military development be lower tech weapons. Cheap drones rather than million dollar missiles.
With regard to "AI weaponry": First, AI weapons are broadly a dumb idea. Second: As mentioned, nuclear weapons exist. AI isn't going to magically stop [insert western country] from obliterating China if China were to send their army of wunderwaffe robots.
March 30, 2026: https://thedefender.media/en/2026/03/fedorov-shared-info-abo...
> At the same time, the team is developing simulation and modelling environments for testing solutions, AI infrastructure for rapid system deployment, and tools that can be immediately integrated into military units.
So how are AI weapons a broadly dumb idea?
For a state like Ukraine, whether they retained their nuclear weapons is irrelevant; They'd never use them against Russia because the retaliation will always be more severe, whether they target Moscow directly or mere "tactical" use, Ukraine would lose the nuclear exchange.
And Russia hasn't used it's nukes despite Ukraine not having any nor being under anyone's nuclear umbrella. The threat of sanctions has (thus far) been sufficient.
If somebody visits a flat earther conference and says "you all need to accept the fact that the earth is not flat!" ... then this certainly doesn't prove that the earth is flat. I think you trip over your choice of words. If s/b in general has to go around saying that then your reasoning makes some sense. But if s/b in particular (like Schmidt) has to go around saying sth then this only proves that this particular person has some personal intention or feeling s/he wants to express. I couldn't care less why someone like Schmidt feels like that but I have my ideas. Maybe he just identifies with AI financially and ideologically and likes to provoke.
There's people who go around bothering flat earthers, but despite flat earthers claiming the contrary, they're quite small in number. No mass media effort, no corporate propaganda, no CEOs mentioning all the time.
The largest it ever got were things like the netflix shows. These are pretty illustrative; All of the big attention is not so much on "these people must be convinced of the roundedness of the planet" and more on the dissection of why these people refuse to accept something that is quite easy to prove across a wide variety of otherwise unconnected experiments.
However, the amount of money and energy spent on trying to convince people that “AI will take jobs”, by parties who would benefit from it, implies that these parties maybe don’t fully believe it, or believe that it needs to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If I am certain that I am winning, I sure don’t need to yell it from mountain tops. Unless my winning depends on everyone believing it.
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?
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?
They're still not going to get a job, and if they have a job, they're still going to get laid off no matter how hard they use AI, because the AI can also use AI.
We're being told there's no room for humans in the future.
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
>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.
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.
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.
Now, a different handful of San Francisco companies are asking for lots of money to disrupt society, and I'm just not interested.
Once they started to have algorithmic feeds and those algorithms got tuned for maximum engagement at the detriment of every other factor, that's when things started to spiral downward.
The only part here with which I disagree is that I feel very similarly about the smartphone.
Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419
Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution
"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.
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.
- "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."
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.
In most places with any sort of economic opportunity, I have a very hard time believing that part time earnings would get you housing on par with a full time earner in 1976.
Why would you think that will happen? You seem aware of, for instance, the Industrial Revolution and what it has ultimately resulted in.
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.
They were against that. And people were impoverished, as can be seen in the drop of life expectancy until labour laws were enacted.
>The initial wave of poor health during the industrial revolution gave way to increased life expectancy and decreased levels of infectious disease during the later 19th century, linked to various public health measures.
>By the latter part of the nineteenth century, life expectancy and health improved, and the growing health disparity between rural and urban areas started to decrease.
>Our knowledge of the living conditions of the 19th century, particularly amongst the urban poor, has led to a strong assumption that a significant decline in health occurred at the onset of the Industrial Revolution. We must be cautious not to overly sentimentalise the medieval and early modern periods, when air pollution (primarily from woodsmoke and also sea coal) was common (Brimblecombe, 1976) and adult life expectancy was lower.
Watch them :)
Seriously though, this happens every time technology is introduced, for better or worse.
And while it's annoying, it's actually very helpful too, but you need to get further into your understanding than the emotion arguments people usually have front and center in their mind, because there is real criticism that has real value in there, it's just behind all the annoying knee-jerk reactions.
But again, this happens over and over, every time, seemingly in every community. Even HN has these soft spots, maybe not for AI but for example blockchain and cryptocurrencies are still subjects that somehow bring out these knee-jerk reactions to people (again, sometimes for good reasons, although the initial reaction masks the real cause).
Best we can do is listen and actually understand, instead of just brushing it away as "irrational hatred", because it always comes from somewhere, sometimes personal reasons, sometimes illogical reasons, but always because of something.
Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.
Every new technology brings with it much promise, MUCH bigger hype, grave disappointment once the people who have been using it wrong fail, and then the new batch of winners. This happens any time there's a big leap in our tools, and AI is no exception.
Productivity is how we make things better. We have enough food for everyone because we've leveraged new tools to make the task more productive (the fact that the food is unevenly distributed is a separate problem).
What "insane productivity boosts" are non-coding fields seeing from AI? If anything, coding is the most affected space, and even there I'm not sure I'd classify it as an "insane" productivity boost yet.
Power is more expensive because data centres are using so much of it. Climate change is a tougher problem to solve because we're trying to reduce emissions while the energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations. GHG emissions are going up when they need to go down. Computer hardware prices are through the roof. Fresh graduates, including those in STEM, face uncertainty in a job market that's trying to replace inexperienced, unspecialized, non-experts (i.e. them) with AI. Many of them know how to use AI just fine, but that doesn't necessarily make them employable. You may dream of being a AI-powered super-developer, but the path to that job may go through entry level positions that become harder to find each day.
Critics of AI are not being irrational. They're paying the costs but not reaping the benefits and they don't see a clear path to changing that. I suggest you look into the history of the luddites and the industrial revolution. Today, we see the industrial revolution as a tremendous boon, but it wasn't that for everyone initially. Multitudes spent their entire lives being shafted before the benefits started tricking down. The real kicker is that only some of the people who suffered were luddites. Many were just like you. You can love a fission bomb for the beauty of its physics, but you'll suffer exactly the same fate as an nuclear abolitionist if one is dropped over your city.
I've heard so many different takes on this. Where did you get this information?
If AI were a country, it'd be 12th place in the world for energy consumption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_electrici...
It's gone up considerably since last time I looked. Jeez.