This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way."
Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.
It seems if you already have negative feelings about AI or the speaker, you’re going to interpret their comments as something that reinforces your negative feelings.
To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsibility to prevent the AI revolution from being as bad. All evidence points to it being worse exactly because of corporations like Google. I get that this guy is only the former CEO but the speech seems kinda tone-deaf to the reality here, and I bet that's why he got booed.
Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech:
> “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed up.”
Come to think of it… very appropriate today!
It's not entirely within the power of the creators of technology to control how it is used. In our case, they actively market the technology as replacement for human intelligence, at which it fails miserably and yet companies force it through. I would love to see a more grounded frontier AI company, but beyond certain safety measures, they can't stop people from misusing it.