Do you seriously don't understand why?
The tools are just changing. But everything is always changing.
Again: Sure they have much to boo about, but AI? Gen AI can run on your own machine even, you can fully own the means to your production. How is this wasting the time they spent studying? You still need knowledge and understanding of a field to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.
To me it's a tool. It helps me accomplish my goals with less effort. That's the definition of a tool right? What is AI to you then? Perhaps I'm being dumb, but not sarcastic.
So the question is in what way ai is a tool to these kids.
Said farm workers have also been noticing headlines over the last years like:
"Crop harvester CEO predicts crop harvesting machine will wipe out millions of jobs within months"
"Crop harvester CEO: 'the crop harvester could destroy the world economy'."
"Farm lays off half its employees, pivots to crop harvester" (repeat this one about 10 times a week for months)
Then some idiot walks up to a crowd of farm hands talking about how awesome the crop harvester is.
No shit he's going to get booed lmao. He's fucking lucky they're not beating his ass into a shallow grave.
Who’s to say AI is not a democratizing force? Like the Internet? And book printing before that? Suddenly we all have a Personal Assistant, suddenly we can all build tools to make the computer do what we want.
Hey where is Stephen Fry with his podcasts when you need him!
Any maybe that's where we are today, but AI is rapidly improving and while we don't know what's going to happen there's very clearly a real possibility that instead of just people doing the same jobs but with a better tool, that tool will actually completely replace their jobs. Maybe a significant fraction of the jobs in society. That's no mere tool.
Either we find something better to do than work for -or glue our eyeballs to the products off- our tech overlords or they go down with us. (I used that dash myself thank you).
Or ok, perhaps laws are in order that state that AIs need to pay taxes too, and do some wealth redistribution that way…
Maybe capitalism is now broken and we need something new to help us deal with post scarcity socially.
I for one welcome our new Starfleet overlords.