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College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

tomshardware.com

181–190 of 405 posts

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#181
post #13

> “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 b…

His next line was about agreeing with that fear so his 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"?

"Some of you may die, but that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make."

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#182

"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)

I bet "deal with it" is exactly the kind of inspiring message these kids were hoping to hear.

They will deal with it alright.

It's only so many speeches like this before the boos turn into other things.

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#183
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Trying to wrap my head around how one can still be around someone in 2023 after what happened in 2021. This confusion no way justifies what happened nor am I blaming anyone. I just don't understand it.

It turns out that rapists like to enter relationships with damaged people, and damaged people have trouble leaving violently abusive relationships. I know understanding isn't a strength of yours, but hopefully this helps. >nor am I blaming anyone Saying this doesn't immunize you from valid criticism of victim-blaming. Your question is basically "Why would the victim let it happen again?". I know you're "just asking q…

No, you're projecting your own arm chair therapist thoughts here. The victim may have perfectly valid reasons that they justify for themselves. That does not mean that I will understand it. Lots of things can be justified while at the same time not making rational/logical sense. Emotional decisions rarely do. I've never been in a relationship with physical violence, but I have been in relationships that have been toxic and mentally/verbally abusive on both ends. I now recognize them much faster with age and ruthlessly end them as soon as the fog of new relationship allows it to be recognized. Days since most recent end of relationship: 3

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is one and the same. Wrong. I have a hugely negative opinion on cars that I express often. Still, I think streets should be complete, and roads built for all modes of travel, and more restrictive laws on car use. > Is that a threat? No. Do you feel threatened? Rest assured, you won't be the billionaire and I won't be a part of the mob, but I'm warning that is what will happen when ordinary people are pushed too…

[flagged]

I didn't say I wanted to ban it, just that we could. Human beings have collectively regulated all kinds of maths, ideas, and ideologies.

I am not a Luddite. I am saying that humans collectively have the power to control things for our benefit.

Thankfully I've already passed on my genome :)

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#185
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you seriously don't understand why?

Do you seriously think everybody is a programmer now that we have AI? Or that we don't need programmers anymore? 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 t…

Kids fresh out of college with crippling student debt and no jobs should just buy increasingly expensive GPUs capable of running the best local models. Well done, problem solved.

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#186

GenAI is the first technology that I've ever seen that is actively rejected by young adults and fervently pushed by people over 55. It seems Eric Schmids of the world think they (in their 70s) have more say about the future of these students than the students themselves. That is very unlikely.

Follow the money. People over 55 are most concerned about one thing: retirement. Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for. In the US, you do this by holding assets that yield returns on your investment. Over the last half-century, we've made returning that yield the main objective of publicly-traded corporations to the complete exclusion of everything else. People like Schmid…

Since when does retirement mean living off money you didn't labor for? The whole point is the opposite - you can only retire if you have enough resources/income (pension, 401K, gold bars, etc) that you can support yourself without working.

In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#188
post #87
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we were young the future was so bright woahohh The old neighborhood was so alive woahohh

"When you were young, the light shined so bright. Shine on, you crazy diamond" a song from the same bygone time, we'll romanticizing about, we've not really even started romanticizing about yet.

IIRC that was very specifically about Syd Barrett, the first Pink Floyd frontman, who took* too much acid and “retired early.”

* it is super lame that people dosed him without his consent

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#189

"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)

None of these people even had to mention AI in their speeches. They could have just done the normal, generic "Dream big, believe in yourself, attaboy" kind of speech and then gone back to their 3rd homes in Malibu.

But no, they just had to both mention it AND rub everyone's noses in it. They know they've already won, and are arrogantly making sure the next generation doesn't forget who's meant to be on the lower rungs of the social and economic totem pole.

Either that, or they actually think that everyone shares their positive outlook on AI and have totally failed to read the room.

Re: College students drown out AI-praising commencement speeches with boos

#190
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>But why so anti AI specifically I think maybe AI is just the last straw for many people. If capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely. Whether or not it can achieve that is secondary to the goal itself. Grads are facing a brutal job market where much of what they just spent several years of t…

> AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely

Decreasing human toil for the same level of production should be the dream of _everyone_. If it's only capitalists in favor then that's a massive indictment of the non-capitalists.

This reminds me of the famous Bastiat quote: "If, then, the utility of any branch of industry is to be estimated not by the amount of satisfactions it is fitted to procure us with a determinate amount of labour, but, on the contrary, by the amount of labour which it exacts in order to yield us a determinate amount of satisfactions, what we ought evidently to desire is, that each acre of land should yield less corn, and each grain of corn less nourishment…"

The misunderstanding that labor and not production is the basis of prosperity leads to some pretty silly conclusions.

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