College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/college-students-drown-out-ai-praising-commencement-speeches-with-boos-deal-with-it-one-speaker-fires-back-as-students-heckle-positive-pitches-for-ais-role

92•iancmceachern•1h ago

Comments

bogzz•1h ago

The kids are alright.

tyleo•54m ago

Every one of these posts about boos at commencement speeches has one of these comments near the bottom. I feel like I’m failing some pop culture quiz. What does this mean?

bananaflag•47m ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Are_Alright_(song)

jackdoe•41m ago

in contrast with:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Aren%27t_Alright

bix6•26m ago

When we were young the future was so bright woahohh

The old neighborhood was so alive woahohh

ahoy•46m ago

AI is largely unpopular outside of the tech & business worlds. Most laypeople see it as falling on a spectrum between unwanted and annoying (google getting worse, AI chatbots proliferating in every app and site) to actively harmful (jobs being replaced by ai).

The fact that comments agreeing with this sentiment get downvoted here isn't a huge surprise, hn is firmly inside the tech/business world.

jknoepfler•24m ago

Most people will experience it as sludge, if they experience it at all. Countries that do not aggressively regulate AI out will see our already profoundly eroded customer service ecosystem disintegrate completely. The already opaque and awful systems that determine things like access to credit or access to healthcare will become even more opaque and inscrutable and produce measurably worse outcomes for actual humans.

This is kinda obvious to most people, who are already experiencing an enormous amount of sludge in their daily life.

Tech-bro optimism in the face of GenAI is so painfully decoupled from lived reality it's frightening. Tech has not made the world a better place for most people over the last fifteen years, and it is poised to make things much, much worse.

inanutshellus•23m ago

What's this have to do with the thread you replied to?

And... anyway... Google just changed its homepage to make "AI Mode" / LLM responses the norm. LLM usage is just going to be the norm for the foreseeable future. Doesn't matter if a wary set of "laypeople" are reticent. They're still going to ask Google questions and be affected by it in their digital lives.

ImPostingOnHN•12m ago

For what it's worth, you're probably downvoted way more for the whole "woe is me, I'm always downvoted for being right by people who are wrong" false martyrdom routine. Maybe leave that part off your post next time: it only detracts from the rest of it.

You might also refrain from generalizations like "hn is firmly inside the tech/business world". HN is not a single person, there are a variety of people here with a variety of experiences and opinions and biases.

jfyi•40m ago

It's a song by "The Who". Though given the controversy their lead songwriter (Pete Townshend) has been through, I personally would refrain from quoting him on the topic of kids.

fractorial•1h ago

> Schmidt, who served in various capacities as CEO, Chairman, and technical advisor to Google and its parent company Alphabet across several decades, ...

It is gratuitous to say “several,” no?

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

dfxm12•18m ago

Just like Mickey Rooney's span of being the top box office draw from 1939-1940. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UDQfFtiOk4

lithos•48m ago

AI Bros are spending too much good will being obnoxious about fancy approximation algorithms, when their purpose in real AI will be lizard brain/reflex type actions.

The next AI winter can't happen soon enough. (Note each past AI winter did give us new tools just like this one will, it's just a shame that it'll be an excuse to worsen customer support)

tdeck•12m ago

Unfortunately this AI ship has the US economy lashed to its bow, and the moment it begins to founder we're all going to have to hold our breath for a while in the best case. Thought leaders are all out of ideas that don't have AI in them (and even that ideation is probably being delegated to an LLM these days).

sarreph•40m ago

Discussed here (2 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177785

dijksterhuis•35m ago

other recent related submissions based on searching for "commencement"

- Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed at Arizona U commencement speech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204166 - 26 points | simonebrunozzi | 5 hours ago | 6 comments

- Why College Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200823 - 6 points | 65 | 13 hours ago | 1 comments

- Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196546 - 116 points | 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 19 hours ago | 179 comments

- Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 - 163 points | wrxd | 2 days ago | 167 comments

- Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175130 - 4 points | mgh2 | 2 days ago | 0 comments

- University of Arizona students boo Eric Schmidt's AI cheerleading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171852 - 103 points | latexr | 3 days ago | 1 comments

- UCF Commencement Speaker Draws Boos After A.I. Remarks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 - 11 points | reaperducer | 5 days ago | 13 comments

- Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 - 182 points | cdrnsf | 9 days ago | 217 comments

- UCF Commencement Speaker Booed When Calling AI Next Industrial Revolution [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094523 - 6 points | latexr | 9 days ago | 2 comments

teekert•22m ago

And here yesterday (different source): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198281

ghaff•39m ago

Correctly or not (probably to some degree correctly) new grads are hearing AI is a major reason why they're having trouble finding jobs which is simultaneously 1.) Probably mostly has always been the case--I no longer have the vast sheaf of rejection letters when I ever got one at all and 2.) Is anecdotally actually the case for a variety of reasons that also include pandemic overhiring and probably an out-sized AI effect on junior engineers, probably especially programmers.

xmcp123•11m ago

I think the overhiring sentiment is largely accurate, but not as it’s frequently presented.

It’s not purely over hiring, it’s that many of these companies are doubling down on AI spend(in terms of model creation, hardware investment, etc), and need to allocate their funds differently.

So it’s not AI efficiency causing the layoffs, it’s AI resource allocation.

And the reason they don’t have the funds to invest? Overhiring.

A lot of the companies doing layoffs (META, Microsoft, Amazon) aren’t just using AI coding tools, they’re trying to be the hardware and be the models behind the AI.

And they see the failure to do so as an existential threat.

AnimalMuppet•9m ago

I think it's more than that. They've heard for most of their lives that college is the way to a good job. Now they're graduating, many of them with debt, and as they do, they're hearing that AI means that the jobs won't be there. And now, at their commencement, someone is talking about AI. One of the people responsible is talking about AI!

Who thought that this was going to go well?

Y-bar•38m ago

> “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 are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.”

The total lack of self-awareness that Schmidt and his cohort of tech billionaires has significantly contributed to all this is screaming even louder than the boos.

nemomarx•27m ago

His next line was about agreeing with that fear so how messaging is just incoherent to me. I guess very "well we did it anyway, get ready for your jobs to go away and to deal with a big mess we made"?

MSFT_Edging•25m ago

Tim Robinson in the hotdog costume loudly exclaiming "we're all trying to find the guy who did this"

dude250711•36m ago

They just have not considered the massive shareholder value being captured, which under capitalism is certainly guaranteed to trickle down, as it had been historically proven time after time.

internet_points•27m ago

</s> ?

spacechild1•12m ago

The parent comment was so sarcastic, it actually defeats Poe's law.

analogpixel•32m ago

> Tennessee State University suggested AI was "rewriting production as we sit here" and told his audience to "deal with it" as they jeered him in response.

Guess it doesn't take much to see what's under the mask.

tdeck•17m ago

For folks that didn't read the article, it seems he was talking about music production.

teekert•10m ago

So what is he supposed to say? "Ok let's stop developing AI so you can all have the exact job you trained for?" That hasn't been the case for decades.

When I left my eduction I could sequence 200 basepairs using gels. Now I process terabytes of NGS data on supercomputers. I dealt with it, I enjoyed it.

Edit: Not saying these kids have nothing to rage against, they can't afford houses, are uninsured, they face a huge wealth gap in the population, possible a war, the country is tearing apart... But why so anti AI specifically?

alistairSH•2m ago

It's a college graduation speech, he's not required to touch on any specific topics.

"AI is going to upend your nascent adulthood and career" is pretty tone-deaf when delivered by a semi-retired billionaire who was was neck-deep in a conspiracy to reduce wages in his industry barely 20 years ago.

markus_zhang•1m ago

He can shut up?

tedggh•24m ago

Eric Schmidt’s speech was particularly bad regardless of the subject, his condescending tone alone deserved the booing.

RickJWagner•23m ago

I’d be anxious, too, if I were just starting my career. Those kids just invested a lot of time and money in an education, and the payoff looks a lot like a gamble.

But AI is going to help, not hurt in the long run. Technology always makes things better and cheaper in the long run. Poverty diminishes, free time increases, things truly do get better over time. This’ll be a short term bump, but it’ll be a steep one.

goda90•18m ago

Your viewport is too zoomed out. When you zoom in on the march of human progress, you'll find a lot of spikes in the amount of human suffering along the way. As we start to hit the limits of what Earth can sustain, do you really feel confident that the next spike will dissipate quickly?

TrackerFF•21m ago

Yeah, it is incredibly tone deaf.

I can fully understand some executives trying to hype up AI with the "It'll create more jobs!" mantra, but as it happens, the AI boom coincided with the post-COVID layoffs (from the hiring frenzy we saw back then) - so even though AI might directly not be responsible for less junior/grad hiring in the various industries, the vibe is that it is still responsible for the tough times college grads are facing.

GrinningFool•14m ago

I am starting to see so much consistency in the "it's not AI, it's overhiring" commentary that it's actually starting to feel like a narrative constructed to allay concerns about AI impacts. At this point it's a "pandemic overhire correction" that the industry has been doing for two years, and is accelerating.

bix6•21m ago

Imagine bringing a new technology into the world, telling everyone it’s gonna take everything from them including possibly their literal lives, and then telling a bunch of kids to get on board or they’re gonna miss the billionaire rocket ship! lol these people are so out of touch.

hermannj314•20m ago

"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)

cute_boi•13m ago

Needs more booing. These so-called rich people have the gall to say, “You guys are going homeless, and there is nothing you can do about it. However, please use AI.”

analog31•12m ago

The same people who are being boo'd for being AI tycoons would have been cheered by the same students 4 years ago for just being tycoons.

I hope everybody reflects on the fact that it's the same people.

nehal3m•10m ago

Am I out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.

b40d-48b2-979e•10m ago

No? What is this ad hominem?

Trasmatta•9m ago

This isn't true at all

dsr_•6m ago

If your behavior doesn't change when you realize the world has changed, that's a bad sign.

So, the change in behavior by the students is a good sign.

josefritzishere•2m ago

Read the room pal.

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RISC-V and Floating-Point

CopyFail: From Pod to Host

Simulated Evolution on the PICO-8

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College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

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