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Comment by rdtsc | Hacker News Reader

> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.”

How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.

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It's a rhetorical attempt to tie "those who dislike AI" to "those who dislike immigrants, and we all know they're super-duper evil".

It's a relatively cheap trick, badly executed.

No tricks I'm sure. Commencement speeches, like most, are scripted. There was already a point prepared about pushing towards less populism (my take, I haven't seen the script of course), the interesting adlib here is having to get to the main pushes from the script to an audience not listening.

I think his train of thought is "young graduates generally aren't anti-immigration, so if I insinuate they're anti-immigration if they disagree with me they will be convinced by my argument". I don't think we need to read much more than that into it.

this is how i took it as well. he’s creating a false equivalency between AI and immigrants, and attempting to justify it with “diversity of perspectives” and trying to tell you that to remain intellectually consistent you must embrace or reject both.

I agree. I think it's telling that AI leaders need to rely on fallacious reasoning and trickery to promote their product.

A good product should sell itself.

I feel that AI leaders have been shoving their product down our throats for the last two years (at least).

It's important to realize that those people are sociopaths. They delight in the suffering of the common man through their complete lack of empathy.

Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them being particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.

> It's important to realize that those people are sociopaths. They delight in the suffering of the common man.

> Also, just because they are very good at climbing the corporate ladder (which is a skill on its own), it doesn't necessarily translate to them particularly smart on fields beyond their expertise.

I couldn't agree more. Thank you for your comment!

Also something I noticed: whenever you see them talking about AI, they all seem to have the same smirk on their faces: that “we’re making you a permanent underclass and you just have to deal with it” smirk. They all have it.

This commenter seems fishy (AI).

You know, I am usually one to immediately jump to "to hell with that" when someone brings up Hanlon's razor, but I think it may apply here.

He certainly is creating a false equivalency between AI and immigrants, but with how tone-deaf this speech is, it may not be deliberate. He likely already has this association.

So then the question would be: why would he have this association?

My only guess is he has a fairly shallow view of both as cheap labor. Which is pretty malicious after all.

He's just trying to meet the graduates at their intellectual level, since the graduates' boos operate at about the same level of depth.

What would a crowds more sophisticated, intellectual, form of answer be?

A hearty "fuck off" I would suppose?

> What’s the logic here

Tenuous connection between unrelated topics to fit them into larger ingroup/outgroup dynamics is the junkfood of persuasion tactics. Bad for you but addictive anyway. If you look for it you'll see it all the time.

"If you don't like AI, you're a nazi."

And remember: they don't call you a nazi because they think you are. They call you a nazi to make you a valid target.

Are there many cases where calling someone a Nazi - especially powerful people - actually did something to their lives? Ruin their careers, ruin them financially, led to their family breaking up?

Trump has had how many assassination attempts now? The attempt in Pennsylvania killed an innocent bystander, a father, in the crowd.

Charlie Kirk was called Nazi by many and eventually shot dead in front of his children.

So yes, unfortunately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Don...

> FBI deputy director Paul Abbate called Crooks's activity on social networking services antisemitic, anti-immigrant, extreme, and espousing political violence.

Hmm....

"This AI was built by a woman, don't you support their cause?.."

It's a pretty classic move. "My political party stands for freedom and prosperity; you can't be against those things, can you?"

It means nothing, as you imply. He is improvising and deflects with a point that he thinks will land with his audience and detract from the issue.

Utterances that come out of executive’s mouths don’t have truth values. They’re sounds meant to irritate people’s nervous systems to achieve the exec’s goals.

Relevant Kendall Roy quote: "Words are just uh, what? Nothing. Complicated airflow."

Actual generous interpretation: The adaptation required as workplaces adopt AI is the same as the ones immigrants have to go through in a new country. There's new modes of thinking, new workflows and an expanded surface of responsibility. Those that expect an easy definable role they can plug themselves into, to get the comfortable jobs (tm) of yesterday will not find those readily. They are there though, they just look different. The working immigrant (usually) doesn't find a spot for them to plug into, they have to hustle and adapt to find such a spot.

Corporate bosses have been screaming for more "hustle-y" employees for decades so that is nothing new.

That's a pretty good steelman.

I do think there's a gestalt (esp. among younger folks) of "AI is bad", to put it bluntly. An anecdote I saw today was:

parent: we're having dinosaur meat for dinner tonight.

kid: oh, that's just AI.

(i.e. "that's made-up" or "that's silly" or "that's just lies") -- none of which are a positive sentiment)

WTF - that wasn't the sequence of his statements. Are you some sort of engagement bot trying to stir up anger?

The boos about AI: https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?si=aouJBuUZxul40LAr...

The "If you'd let me make this point, please", 75 seconds later: https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?si=5sG8c5qEcaXOwmAv...

I think he is saying that if you are against AI you are against progress and so "America will no longer be the country that ambitious people want to come to". I don't think there was a point there about immigration being somehow equivalent to AI, that would come out of nowhere.

That seems like a really tenuous connection for him to make if that's what he's doing. I find it difficult to believe that ambitious people outside of a certain niche would refuse to come to the US because of perceived lack of AI progress. They'd refuse/are refusing to come because of the US's increasing hostility to outsiders, cutting of research funding, and subpar living conditions.

there is no logic - just fallacy. it is a red herring, wrapped up in equivocation. he commits appeal to emotion, non sequitur, false equivalence along the way.

New expansion, AI = artificial immigrant

Somebody said "alien" she thought they said "illegal alien" and signed up!

P.S. I just couldn't resist, sorry

He's trying to virtue signal based on an understanding of young people's values that's so unsophisticated that he thinks throwing them the word "immigrant" will get them on his side. And they're obviously smart enough to see through it.

Wouldnt a "diversity or perpsectives" would include those that differ from that of Silicon Valley

Generous interpretation: instead of pearl-clutching over ethnicities and traditionalism America invited the world to immigrate and encouraged diverse ideas and industries. Other societies have shunned even foreign food and music (most countries barely have different races), never mind porn industry ('burn the degenerates'), space travel ('why waste money on the moon'), nuclear power, computers etc. Is AI not yet another industry that is easy to disregard yet potentially transformative?

Corporate interpretation: listen you filthy cattle, gen-AI is bottoming out all our pesky human labour costs and allowing me and my friends to milk every last drop out of this late-stage capitalist nightmare, you better get used to it because from now on 99% of you will just have to make do scraping by in the gig economy, selling your bodies or just generally being dancing monkeys for billionaires - we'll still hire some of you as nurses and waiters because we don't exactly want clankers looking after our kids

Isn't that generous interpretation, like, profoundly idiotic if he meant it? Major multiracial feature of America happened due to slave trade at the time when genocide of native Americans was also going on. Other countries have porn industry, actually a lot of it. Other countries have nuclear power, but America is just in one war claiming it wants to stop the other country from the nuclear power.

Other countries typically have tons of foreign music and entertainment, most notably American music. America is the one that seems to be looking inwards here (due to being dominant on an international market - I am not saying it is sinister).

I think thats missing the point. Being multiracial is a function of being open, not a means to the end. America is a can-do country that generally embraces new things, which includes 'new people' and new ways.

I'm not American but for all its faults I can see it is clearly miles ahead in terms of economics, innovation and generally being the worlds only "real" new-world diverse democracy.

Yes it is pretty much run by corporate interests and yes it has started almost every war in the Middle East in the past century for the benefit of AIPAC. Yes it has skipped almost all the benefits of socialism that I enjoy as a European, and of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world I think ~48 are in North and South America.

Other countries do not "typically have tons of foreign music" - China is 99% ethnic Chinese, black people are basically not even allowed in restaurants there. The same goes for India and much of Africa. Europe is closest and the UK probably bridges the attitudes of Europe and America the most - which is why the UK also pioneered things like computing and multiculturalism.

>of the 50 most dangerous cities in the world I think ~48 are in North and South America

Why have you bundled South America with North America? Of the top 50, I see 4 from the US. Compared to about 40 (eye balling it) from South America.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_homicide_rat...

> How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of immigrants? AI is like an immigrant, you have to accept it? What’s the logic here, or he’s just throwing random phrases around, it seems.

Maybe it ties in because, if you're not excited and enthusiastic about AI and our new Ways of Working, you're a racist. You don't want to be a racist, do you? AI is basically exactly like a black person getting chased by a lynch mob. Do you stand with the racist lynchers? Or with the civil rights movement (the billionaire AI promoters).

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