Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

What I found surprising of the couple of video examples I've seen was not the students' reactions; those were completely predictable. Rather, what most stood out to me was the absolute detachment displayed by the speakers in believing that the students would like to hear their dystopian AI maximalism, and their inability to read the room and understand the reaction from the audience.

I think you're agreeing with the parent comment more than you think; the skills needed to excel at school are in a lot of cases quite oblique to the skills needed to excel in the working world. At least when I was young, no one was able to articulate to me just how little of the rigamarole at school would be totally unnecessary in the working world, and the transition was quite a surprise for me.

A few high-level differences:

  - There has never been a time in my entire working career -- ever, where I could not reference something or look it up. What matters is that I know the concepts; I'm _always_ allowed (in fact, encouraged) to double check and reference my facts.

  - If I dislike a topic in front of me, I can expend effort and do something else. For instance, one my first "real" jobs was working in the Apple store. You could either do repairs or take in broken computers. One role was critical thinking, the other was customer service. If you were an excellent tech, they would make you do the customer service bit far less often. But you can't get out of writing English essays in school by excelling in mathematics.

  - In school you receive instruction for a long period of time and then are asked to recall and analyze what you've learned. But, there is no real recursive mechanism for learning your craft; if you need to take apart a macbook 5-10 times a day, you'll develop real expertise. And there will really be no penalty to being initially poor at the task. Nothing in school really works this way; you never approach any topic in depth, and you don't get real practice -- you just get a test which is a distance enough behavioral reward mechanism that it cannot really reinforce the neural pathways.

I understand that this is a bit oblique to LLMs, but I think LLMS map the same way. Do I need to know how to write a python script? Not really ... the LLM just does it for me. And the job only cares that it works, they really don't care that the work is elegant. I understand _why_ you would want kids to really learn the process -- this is a special time in their life where time and energy is set aside just for learning. But, the lessons they see from the real world really do clash with the ideals pushed and hoped for by teachers and administrators. When they get a job, they can actually just let the LLM do a bunch of the work.

The people who are faced with this question are so far removed from the idea that losing your job means not being able to eat or pay rent that it seems pointless to ask them.

Whenever I try to get serious answers to this question I get far-future projections about how much better people’s lives will be in the aggregate, at some point in the future, on the assumption that their baseless, faith-based projections about AI materialize.

They literally do not care if their own neighbors starve, or become homeless, or lose any ability to plan their own lives more than a few days in advance.

This is the predictable result of the deep inculcation of spreadsheet-based “utilitarianism,” frequently paired with heavy drug use and paranoia-inducing science fiction horror stories, that certain communities of Bay Area tech workers were exposed to (inducted into, groomed into, whatever word you want to use) in the last decade or so.

This toxic soup taught many people that individual lives literally do not matter when weighed against the importance of creating AGI. This set of beliefs already has a body count, and it will grow before this train crashes.

how do you... earn those savings in the first place? (or am I missing a /s somewhere?)

Executives of these tech companies keep saying the automation of intelligence will drive job creation because previous waves of automation did the same.

To anyone with a brain, that is obviously not true.

If AI continues to improve at the pace that it has been, why would anyone hire a human to do the thinking? Human intelligence will be orders of magnitude more expensive, and much slower...

The tech executives know this and they actually just do not care. The reason they are saying it will drive job creation is just to temporarily keep worker anxiety levels to a minimum.

To be clear, I am not claiming that all human work will be automated away soon. Just that a huge portion of it will be.