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Comment by hermannj314 | Hacker News Reader

"After my speech for the troops about how we are losing in Iran, my speech to children with cancer about how we've gutted research, sure I can then give a speech to people entering the job market about how AI is ruining the job market"

Perfect, that's exactly the message of despair we want to send! (How I imagine picking these speakers goes at every college campus)

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None of these people even had to mention AI in their speeches. They could have just done the normal, generic "Dream big, believe in yourself, attaboy" kind of speech and then gone back to their 3rd homes in Malibu.

But no, they just had to both mention it AND rub everyone's noses in it. They know they've already won, and are arrogantly making sure the next generation doesn't forget who's meant to be on the lower rungs of the social and economic totem pole.

Either that, or they actually think that everyone shares their positive outlook on AI and have totally failed to read the room.

They’re so disconnected from reality, living in their own bubble.

I don't know if you're aware but a big meme at Google from when Eric was CEO was when he was encouraging all googlers to install Nest in "one of your homes"

Their behaviors feel so detached and alien to me. Here are my hypotheses:

- They love AI and are so self-absorbed that they struggle to think of other people's perspectives. They only view it through their own lens and are oblivious to it. So, to them, others' opinions should mirror theirs, which is why it doesn't register for them.

- They know of the impacts their ideas will have, but think that the positives will somehow eventually trickle down to the commoners and the negatives will be minimized or only affect people that 'deserve it'.

- They genuinely despise young people and this is just a socially acceptable way of expressing their hatred - they understand everything.

Which one of the three do you think it is? Or are there other reasons?

If I had to guess, I'd say it's a non-zero, but double-digit percentage of each of those, depending on the person.

>Their behaviors feel so detached and alien to me.

Because they are. Extreme wealth is literally a brain disease. It is physically impossible to remain a normal empathetic human being with that level of detachment from reality. Back when things were 10x, or 100x difference, there was still some amount of reality that just couldn't be abstracted away from you having to deal with. But the modern day reality of >1000x disparity has completely removed that, and they are more or less living as demigods to us in comparison.

It’s just a completely different class + being an exec requires certain personal traits. These two combine to whatever we see nowadays. You can call it detachments or whatever, but to be a successful exec you basically have to be a big asshole and a giant owbua.

Basically they believe whatever they did is righteous in a religious way, and how can you not see it? These types of thoughts.

There is no middle ground.

you could have stopped with AI makes them rich. Why cares about anyone else.

But it's not that simple. The point I'm making is that their reaction to making money also feels very inhuman.

Suppose your comapny just won a key contract, putting your competitors out of business. Would you go to stand on a stage in front of the other business, gleefully talking about how your victory will upset the industry? How it's a sign of the changing times, but a blessing in disguise because those employees get a chance to move to another career, or practice valuable budgeting and social skills in the line to the food bank?

Yeah, they're fucking sociopaths. We have enough history at this point. The results are in. The verdict is clear.

It's tempting to assume malice, I don't doubt some of them really are so spiteful, but I assume most are just that out of touch.

It's ironic that these speakers tout AI benefits but failed to use it to learn what college students are concerned about

Why would they? It's so trivial to do it yourself, it's easy to imagine what they're concerned about. Things like the optimal number of agents to deploy in their swarm, the best way to use AI to route yacht and private jet movements between your residences, what kind of AI business to start after graduation and how many billions to invest in it.

They aren't out of touch when it comes to the prospect of cutting jobs and how it will pump their stock portfolios. They are drooling so hard the big risk is that they make the axe handle slick and throw the axe instead of slicing the job prospects of those in the audience.

"Wait, those are real people whose jobs I cut? I thought they were just numbers"

> Perfect, that's exactly the message of despair we want to send! (How I imagine picking these speakers goes at every college campus)

AI-era commencement speeches should totally be gloating "Ha, ha! I'm going to get immensely rich, and most of you fools are going to end up in the gutter! Sucks to be you [sticks out tongue]! Great for me, me, me! AI. Is. Awesome."

I bet "deal with it" is exactly the kind of inspiring message these kids were hoping to hear.

They will deal with it alright.

It's only so many speeches like this before the boos turn into other things.

Absolutely. They have no idea the vitriol my classmates have for them. I really am worried, lot of friends are very casual about their extremism. When anger and disgust is the feeling of the majority: it’s only a matter of time…

Your comment really drove home for me the lack of empathy and humanity in these speeches, even neglecting the AI stuff. These young people are celebrating a real accomplishment and a life milestone. They’re about to enter a world where their decisions will shape our society. In that context, a speech like this is just gauche.

i think we should not think they are gullible but they want to make they think they are. they want a message through and the message is that they are creating a threat and they will use it.

For what it's worth, this might not be a recent phenomenon only. My dad has been saying for decades that the speaker at my mom's college graduation (Paul Tsongas, if I'm remembering correctly) was incredibly depressing and basically just said "the world sucks out there, good luck going into it".

Mine was "The world sucks. We need brilliant people like you to save it. Please help."

That was the gist of mine as well. "There are too many problems and too few people who care. So please care, and don't let the size of the problems keep you from caring."

“And don’t get distracted by money, fame, and power like I did.”

In nyc, elder rats have been known to encourage younger rats to take the first bite, to determine if the food is poisoned

what do people need to hear? inspiration or truth? Personally I want the cold awful truth. But I think humanity in general thrives on inspiration and delusion.

Cold awful truth is fine, but people do need some perspective.

What people need and should hear depends on the situation. When you visit a dentist, you don't need to hear about how to properly build a house, no matter how truthful it is. You should hear truth about state of your teeth. Or, if you are having a wedding speech, you should not pontificate about how to keep the bathroom clean - even if what you say is cold hard truth.

Second and importantly, it is not like these commencement speakers would be concerned with truth or were trying to convey truth in their speeches. The dilemma here is not "truth versus inspiration/delusion". Schmidt was not selling truth, he was selling his product and was trying to make people believe things that will make him earn more. Schmidt want trying to sell inspiring vision of the world for the students, he effectively put them into a passive-you-dont-matter role in his vision.

The truth cannot be either cold nor awful.

It appears you prefer dressing up your feelings in stoicist aesthetics.

Like a snake pretending to be a statue.

What they should be saying is "yes this new technology is going to take away all your jobs, which is why I am fighting for universal basic income".

The first step in resolving any problem is acknowledging that it exists. Ignoring real issues in favor of comfortable narratives is insane.

College students had 4+ years to learn about the real issues before the graduation ceremory, and the rest of their lives after it. Rubbing every problem in the world in their face at a graduation ceremony is just gauche.

To everything a time and a season. Not every second has to dedicated to "problems".

"Not every second has to dedicated to "problems"." I was a lot quicker to agree with this sentiment in prior decades where we had notionally fewer of them, the big ones seemed better understood, and the folks managing the levers of power at least managed the appearance of competence.

This will go over great at weddings and birthday parties!

We need to fight for a better world, but that requires that we're not burnt out by thinking about our problems 24/7. We need some fun and joy to make the fight worthwhile.

There has never been a commencement speech made when the speaker couldn't have spent the entire time speaking about problems. Ever. Not even one. It has always been possible to spin an hour of doom and gloom about the future, based on 100% real problems.

A commencement speech is not the time or place for that.

I'm not saying it has to be 100% upbeat each time, just that it is not the time or place for an enumeration of problems.

It won't even do any good. What are they supposed to do with this that they weren't already doing? It's not like the world was sunshine and rainbows for all of them up to this point and the commencement speech is the correct time to disabuse them of that notion. This isn't your one chance to reach them with news of doom. It's your one chance to send them off and maybe encourage them to fight the doom. It is appalling to miss out on that opportunity because you've got an axe to grind and don't understand that not every opportunity to grind it is appropriate. Actively depressing and discouraging them is almost certainly achieving the opposite of what even you want to achieve.

I think in this case the speaker was talking about a "solution" which the students perceived as a "problem"

Slightly facetiously, but also completely seriously: I thought the speaker was talking about a "solution" that explicitly frames the students as the "problem" - and the students noticed.

I think the speaker was talking about a "problem" which the speaker perceived as a "solution"

Yes, and the audience noticed that his solution was a solution to the problem of "how do I multiply my $40B net worth" and not the problem of "AI blasted the job market how do I pay rent?"

Like I wanna stand here and listen to a tech billionaire run through a list of shit he did to my generation.

I am a teen, so I want you to consider yourself in the shoes of us youngsters.

you grind for 4 years, you might have student debt or a substantial loss of family income as it was invested in your education (I am assuming 30k$)

Now the whole purpose of it was to educate you, now some people cheated their way through with AI or whatever in the education system.

So the whole thing ends up going to the job market and well the job market isn't doing good.

There are multiple (and I mean multiple) factors for the job market to not do good but its not a overexaggeration that people at the top who have influence might be more prone to AI psychosis (Read mitchell's tweet) and how they are all announcing that AI is the reason why you might not have jobs.

Then, you have these same people come to you on stage and say to integrate AI or use AI and this AI that AI.

What would you as a student do in this? Would you not feel angry, frustrated, would you not disagree and you all don't have a mic and can't cut off that speaker with words.

The only thing that you can do to show disagreement is to boo, it takes one kind soul's immense frustration to boo and then everybody would join, would you also not boo if that was the case, to show your disagreement

To finally have a voice because their boos had voice larger than many things which is why we are discussing it here and people are discussing it!

But at the same time, I cannot disrespect teens by lying to their faces.

"The only thing that you can do to show disagreement is to boo,"

thats only if you ban water bottles at such speeches.

I just graduated, my friends and I have realized that these older generations are just ladder pullers: they hate us. I’ve watched my classmates politics and outlook become more extreme over time. I don’t think I have any respect for older generations anymore, I was never this jaded before, but my classmates say more extreme stuff.

I'm also a recent graduate and I can confirm everything you've said. Both me and everyone I know in my age and social group are feeling more hopeless and jaded than ever.

What are your classmates saying? Since our class has little to no power, representation or money, I'm very pessimistic about the odds of anything ever changing.

Hey, which college or country are you from? if you aren't comfortable with it publicly, you can send me a mail. Asking because I am curious although I might be 4 years younger than ya (going to a college rather than getting graduated)

I am actually at a bit of cross-roads myself as the degree would cost 30k$ where I live (for context I live in India) and so the competition and job market is so much that I would only recoup the tuition fees in 2 years. There are some other colleges if I just wanted a degree for the sake of it which are cheaper but literally 0 companies come to them and I would have to look for higher studies (masters). I would actually love some suggestions, I have went more in depth at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097377

I am unsure of how much the industry might change 4 years from now, my only idea is to probably learn more about how things work and to have them around my curriculum and get good grades as this time it would be something that I am interested about (I wish to learn compilers, fpga, for some reason I really want to read golang codebases), I don't know how the job market might be when I land but its really messy right now and I am sorry that you are in the crossarm of it all.

I once made a project[0] on how many words a person has written on hackernews and you have written 60k words on hackernews and so have been a very decent member of it and I think that's because of not external factors or goodhart's law where something becomes a measure but rather because you genuinely enjoy doing these things. I completely understand your pessimism as I feel like I might be in the same boat albeit younger but it feels incredibly unfair to me for all the things that are happening in the world.

I think that being part of the community shows a level of curiosity which is atleast worth a interview or to get to know them more about it, I think that all you want is just a way for you to prove yourself and your skills. I urge the more experienced folks who might be looking for an applicant to perhaps show some support to @tavavex and give them an option to explain themselves.

Not sure if an interviewer reads it and you would actually get an interview and more chances to prove yourselves but the job market is so fundamentally broken at the moment with fake jobs and so much weirdness that even seniors sometimes don't find jobs & another part is that as college graduates, we worry about all the money and time spent on it and all we want is a fair chance. So I just hope that my comments atleast tries to nudge it towards that, perhaps I recommend taking part in the who wants to be hired thread within HN too.

Sorry this got long but I understand this struggle in some sense and its hard to explain but I have tried to try to do best in both explaining it and hopefully helping you out and I hope that you find a decent and stable job.

[0]: https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/

Mate just because you spend more time staring at a screen wringing your hands doesn’t mean there’s notionally more problems

Totally agree, cut the kids a break and give them a pat on the back and tell them something inspiring! Try to remember what it was like to be in their shoes on that day.

Edit: I don’t mean “kids” in a condescending way, I just mean young people taking the first steps into adulthood and careers.

collage students had 4+ years to be gaslit, and redirected from what they were indepedently discovering, toward subservience.

The "boos" are an indication that kids finally understand who to blame. In a dark time, that's a ray of hope: the kids are alright.

> the kids finally understand who to blame

You do realise that “sticking it to the man” is something that kids are uniquely good at?

This isn’t something that’s only just happened in the last generation. It’s how society has operated since before we lived in caves.

The increased younger vote for Trump is a big part of our current set of problems.

Remember: Google was declared a monopoly by Bidens Justice department. We were setting up a system to break down monopolies and restore order to the market. Trump got rid of that.

The problem was Trump marketed himself as being anti-establishment (like many far-right parties do) and people fell for that crap.

It’s the same problem time and time again. people conflate regulation with “the establishment” when in fact it’s usually strict rules and processes that prevent us slipping into a dystopian nightmare. But of course people make this mistake because the same people who stand to benefit from deregulation are the ones pouring millions of dollars/pounds/or whatever your local currency into convincing people that the issue was caused by someone else and can only be solved by removing those safe guards we needed.

I dont think so. Trump promissed male supremacy and many men liked it. The move toward Trump is in men specifically. If it was about establishement, women would move the same way.

Trump also promissed that it will be ok to mistreat some groups and people who hated one of those groups loved the message - sometimes even when they were members of some of those groups.

But, the young voters moving to Trump was male thing and 100% based on misogyny and male supremacy.

The last batch of kids was blaming their job woes on mexicans, women, and authority figures delivering mild punishments for shouting trans slurs. This batch seems more upset with the billionaires or at least AI. That's a big improvement.

There is more than one kind of kid at a time.

And "graduated college" is a well document splitting variable for the clusters you mentioend.

Mmmhmm, and tech workers tended to blame Indians instead of Mexcans, women were less keen on blaming women, the woke percent never went anywhere near 0, and Captain Obvious is a full time job. Observations about the general sentiment of a crowd do not in any way imply uniformity, and it's frankly a bit silly to pretend that they do and then get upset about it.

That statement makes sense for Eric Schmidt but not the random real estate executive. I'm pretty sure they're just taking their anger out at the nearest target

lol the real estate executive celebrating how they've using "AI" to destroy the housing market is maybe not just the "nearest target"

Before GenAI came for their jobs, real estate was more extractive on the younger generation and it wasn't close: the median financed phone is $30/mo while median rent is $1500/mo. We generally find RE less interesting here because it has a scale ceiling and low returns-to-intelligence (compare Elon Musk to Donald Trump) but it's the oldest hustle and it never went away.

And they’re not going to do anything about it, just boo on command and go to work

They might once they try to work and can't find any because the entry level positions have disappeared thanks to AI.

"We're all trying to find the guy who did this" - guy dressed like hotdog

Okay, show me where these commencement speakers are acknowledging that AI is a problem.

Commencement is a time of celebration and accomplishment. The students are well aware of the existence of the problem; that's the exact reason they're booing.

It's like going into your therapist's office and having them trauma-dump on you. Their issues might be entirely legitimate; it's still not the time or place.

For comparison, see Mr. Rogers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=907yEkALaAY

> Some of the loudest hostile voices were reserved for Schmidt’s comments on AI, however. “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts you could never accomplish on your own,” comparing it to a “seat on a rocket ship.” He also suggested that the students will be the ones to “shape artificial intelligence,” even if they “don’t care about science… because AI is gonna touch everything else as well.”

The Google CEO claiming he and other tech billionaires gave you a seat on a rocket ship via AI is not "acknowledging a problem". Booing something you consider a problem is a form of acknowledgment though, so I'm not sure how you can conclude that the speaker was the one doing what you suggested and not the audience here. Do you really think "AI is like a ride on a rocket ship" is an acknowledgment of issues rather than a "comfortable narrative"?

How come the problem isn't that "lots of people really don't like AI"?

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