Here’s a rare news event that hasn’t occurred in, gosh, a week: a university commencement speech was greeted with hostility because the speaker praised AI.
In fairness, the speaker, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was at least trying to thread the needle, vaguely empathizing with students. “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,” he said.
But, as in the case of real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, whose pro-AI speech one week ago triggered an almost identical reaction, it’s easy to see how Schmidt’s words could be perceived as arrogant to a crowd that had heard the AI-inevitability message before a million times. He can be heard telling the crowd of young people they will “help shape artificial intelligence” and that, “If you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is gonna touch everything else as well.”
In perhaps his most ill-advised moment in the 404 Media footage, Schmidt says:
“You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”
I suspect the crowd was probably already picturing itself relegated to steerage on the great “rocket ship” of AI, but Schmidt spelled it out anyway.
Premeditated booing of controversial speakers is common, and tends not to be all that newsworthy. In fact, that also happened last week to noted anti-cancel-culture guy Jonathan Haidt when he spoke at NYU. Judging from the theme of his speech—basically, young people aren’t fragile snowflakes—a low-energy hum of disapproval seems to have been baked into his plan.
But it’s worth paying attention when a speaker’s words—let alone two speakers’ similar words—ignite an unplanned outcry. In fact, I would argue that you can use the spontaneous booing and heckling of commencement speakers in response to their speeches as a sort of crude barometer for picking up populist trends that will, right or wrong, define the next decade or so in politics.
For instance, in 2001, at a December commencement just two months after the September 11 attacks, newspaper publisher Janis Besler Heaphy spoke to the graduates of Cal State Sacramento, and urged vigilance with regards to privacy and liberty during a jingoistic moment in history. Asking “to what degree are we willing to compromise our civil liberties in the name of security?” and saying “the Constitution makes it our right to challenge government policies,” didn’t resonate at the time—and indeed for years afterward—and got Heaphy booed completely off the stage.
In May of 2016, a Cal State Fullerton commencement speech from Univision anchor Maria Elena Salinas got a hostile reaction from what was apparently a more MAGA audience than expected in the heart of California’s Republican-friendly Orange County. In footage you can see her invoke the name of then presidential candidate Donald Trump while defending the news media against a rising tide of disapproval. “Now they’re even blaming us, the media, for creating Donald Trump. Imagine that. Isn’t that terrible?” An ominous rumble starts, and then Salinas switches to speaking Spanish very briefly. The rumble becomes unmistakable jeering. According to one news account, someone even shouted “Speak English.”
A decade later, well, here we are. A telling poll from March found that Trump’s immigration policies have a net approval rating of -19, but the intensity of disapproval for the concept of AI appeared worse in that same poll (even if the finding is statistically identical) at -20 net approval.
So if we use commencement speech reactions as our tea leaves, the next decade might just see a prolonged negative reaction to AI. Meeting such a moment might call for, perhaps, in the words of Blood in the Machine’s Brian Merchant, “a program of rejecting generative AI in extractive and exploitative circumstances, of protecting labor from deskilling, wage degradation, and surveillance, and refusing AI’s intrusion into spheres of public life Silicon Valley [seeks] to colonize and profit from.” I mean just vibes-wise.
At any rate, if you’re a business tycoon planning to address a crowd of college graduates in the next few weeks, try to remember who you’re talking to. These people have just spent four years reading more books than you probably have in the last 20 years. They are already well informed on AI, thank you, and they are on the verge of trudging into the cruel new employment hellscape you had a hand in creating to compete against millions of spambots and OpenClaw agents for scarce seating on your AI rocket ship that feels like it’s headed directly for the sun.