> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.” How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of…
Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
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Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#272> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom, open debate, equality and the willingness to engage with those they disagree with. I think it was a great embrace of freedom and open debate to boo him for only asserting predictions that benefit him.
Shouting people down isn’t “open debate”.
Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#273Earlier quoted context omitted.
AI promotional strategies are profoundly and uniquely illiberal. AI leaders are not interested in open debate and they have demonstrated this again and again. Shouting this person down is the appropriate, humane response.
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Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#274> “If you’d let me make this point, please —” Schmidt said amid boos. “The point I’d like to make is choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.” How does that tie in? You have to like AI because of…
Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#275Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but n…
It's worse than having to pick one position or the other: both are hypocritical, and both are deceptive hype mongering. Layoffs credited, or blamed depend depending on your point of view, on AI are mostly a product of herd mentality. As for the advice to learn how to use AI, that's advice that suffers from internal inconsistency. If AI is so embodying of human expertise, why does one have to learn the correct way to…
Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#276Tons of CEOs right now keep saying “young people need to learn how to use AI to be successful” and also “we aren’t planning to hire any new college grads due to AI”.. so which one is it.. seems everybody understands the super pro AI CEOs want to lay off nearly the entire company and run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich. While “some other” companies should totally hire lots of young people but n…
> run it on skeleton crew with a ton of AI and get ultra rich... I don't get people who believe this. Why would an AI company provide a service that someone can sell at 10x the price, mostly unchanged? Why wouldn't the AI company sell it directly?
Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#277Earlier quoted context omitted.
Political conservatives are generally all in on AI. There is some resistance from the “crunchy momma” wings of the conservative movement, but overall political liberals are putting up far more resistance to AI.
Political conservatives (at least in the US) have very little left in common with actual conservatism. They are more like neoliberals, primarily catering to the rich for accumulating wealth. So of course they are in on yet another scheme for cutting costs by screwing over normal workers.
Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#278Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#279Can someone in this thread who says “the kids must be wrong” give an actual optimistic case for AI? Because as far as I understand it, the “optimist” case for AI is that LLMs become God and wipe out human life as we know it entirely, and replace it with a transcendent post-human intelligence. And in the meantime, we’ll have a permanent underclass that will be kept alive on some kind of subsistence UBI. That seems to…
The pessimistic case is based on the misconception that AI is some kind of a superhuman. Our current AI models are trained on human data, which has an unfortunate side effect which causes them to think and behave like a human. But as soon as we learn to train them without human data, we find out that AI is just a supercalculator, and it won't have any own will or agency. Will and agency are primal biological instinct…
I don't think you can divorce intelligence from all biological aspects and just get computational power. It's an interesting question though..
Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation
#280Earlier quoted context omitted.
Probably too early for this, but I'm reminded of the Rolling Stones, Sympathy for the Devil. Evil acts made real by the decisions of those at the top, and the rest of us reject the acts. But quitely we accept these acts by being satisfied with verbal protest. In other words, we always do whatever is easiest, and rarely are willing to sacrifice our way of life to make real change. One person can never make a differenc…
What kind of sacrifice are you imagine the students to do here? And also, that generation got quite a few students who did sacrificed their future in protests just a few years ago. The crackdown was very real and is still ongoing.
Awareness of issues only gets you so far. But it factors into daily decisions. And when it's all too much to bear, we just push it out of mind and continue with our little sphere of influence.
Society is built up this way: everyone has their own little sphere of influence.
Money and power have much larger spheres.
So you either protest enough to cope and move on, or you get angry enough to change.
Again, I have no answers, just observation. I'm fine with AI, despite realizing our economy is eating itself. You slowly begin to realize all we ever do is eat each other, or other things.