We’ve already had at least one college graduation speaker’s comments about the AI revolution be met with roaring boos from the crowd this month. Now famous ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt has done it as well, getting drowned out by recent college graduates as he tries to lecture them on the promise of artificial intelligence.
The gist of Schmidt’s speech, delivered at the University of Arizona’s spring semester graduation on Sunday, was that while the fear of AI replacing jobs and threatening the environment is “rational,” if you get on board with it and help “shape” it, you’ll be one of the winners and set yourself up for success in the future.
Here’s what he said:
There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create. And I understand that fear. It’s rational, and it’s amplified every day by social media platforms with algorithms that have learned with great precision that fear earns clicks and that anxiety drives engagement, but I want to say something to you this evening as clearly as I can: To speak of the future as though it has already been decided is to surrender the one thing that actually matters.
You are surrendering your agency. The future does not simply arrive, it gets built in laboratories, in dormitories, in start ups, in classrooms, in legislators, and the people building it will be you and people like you. The question is not whether AI will shape the world, it will, the question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence. We do not know the precise contours of what this transformation will look like, but what we do know is it will require each of us to adapt in ways that we cannot yet anticipate.
My hope is that you will choose to engage anyway. That you’ll choose to be in the room where these decisions take place and to have a voice in how they’re made. When you are in that room, bring something with you. Bring the values that make us human in the first place. The technology on its own is just a tool. It will optimize for what we tell it to optimize for, but somebody has to decide, and in your lifetime, that somebody is going to be you.
Schmidt gets halfway to a good point there as he says that speaking of the future as though it has already been decided is defeatist…before proceeding to do exactly that to a room of booing graduates. He goes on to say, “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on. The rocket ship is here.”
If your thesis is that a group of graduates who are about to head into a workforce that has been disrupted by AI—which corporations are using to cut human workers off the payroll—should not accept that the future has already been determined for them, why continue to insist that this tech that barely works is inevitable?
His inability to venture outside his tech bubble or read the room in front of him echoed the situation businesswoman Gloria Caulfield found herself in at the University of Central Florida’s ceremony earlier this month. Students loudly booed the moment she called AI the “next industrial revolution,” and things never got back on track. She looked genuinely shocked and confused.
Sometimes hubris tells you that something that was monumentally embarrassing for someone else might work for you. Maybe Schmidt saw Caulfield’s speech and thought he could better frame the AI takeover as something humans could exist alongside, but we know the score. Corporate interests do not align with that fantasy, and instead this kind of rhetoric just seeks to placate the people who are most at risk.
Which oblivious corporate shill will be the next to try to tell a room of anxious graduates that AI is good, actually? Will the sight of two speakers getting very publicly booed for championing AI in the course of a week be enough to scare off the next person who thinks they will find the magic combination of words to quell the fears of a generation while encouraging grads to embrace the technology? Part of me hopes they’re not, because if I can keep watching videos of these people’s reality distortion fields coming down in real time, that might be enough catharsis to get me through the day.
