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Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

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Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#371

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Question to your question: How many will actually get a job? When the system fails to reward compliance, that begrudging conformity will eventually curdle into systemic disruption. History has proven so time & time again. Lock a massive class of highly educated, financially desperate young people out of the economy.. they won't just starve in silence. They organize unions, radicalize politics, and ultimately rewrite…

Drones and robot killer dogs a la Back Mirror will keep everybody in check until they die an early preventable death from being lied to about COVID, etc. History might rhyme, until it doesn't, due to paradigm shifts like these.

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Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#372
post #103
post #3

Kind of goes to show how out of touch and insular the tech exec sphere can be. Almost everyone I interact with in reality has a deep distain for LLMs and their touted trajectory.

Idk what people you interact with, but my personal sample of “normal people” post AI generated pics and videos in their WhatsApp status and adorn their homes with AI generated imagery for christmas. They may not actively use LLMs or even know what they are, but they’re satisfied with Google’s AI overview and they love using voice assistants. These aren’t people from any particular sphere I sought out or which self-se…

Virtually every person I talk to on a regular basis either (a) generally hates AI but uses it in specific ways because of the utility they perceive, or (b) hates AI and won't use it at all.

The idea that "distain for AI" is limited to "one 'elite' or another" is most definitely not borne out by any polling data. "Of course this goes for practically any cause" seems to be an opinion based on air. Many, many people across all social strata (except maybe millionaires/billionaires) are deeply invested in a wide variety of causes to make the world a better place.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's one perspective. I would love so much to go back and revisit a birthday with my mom and be gifted a framed pic of my dog and I in matching outfits

Well, congrats, you have the power to go make 50 of those in 3 minutes. Enjoy...?

thanks! And in return I hope you make the most of your opportunities to give muted-to-negative responses to gifts given to you by your parents!

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#374
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does it read like to you? To me, the speech (as a whole) reads like: "don't assume AI is going to be as bad as the last technological revolution; embrace it". Computing is great and I love it; LLMs are great and I love them too. But computing is now used by corporations to harass and abuse us on a scale never seen before and AI is starting to be used for that too. So that is why I don't believe it's our responsi…

Was commenting on the quote in particular. It’s just a version of “the future is in your hands” which you can find in one form or another in many graduation speeches. Just seems odd to me to read a cliche line as something cynical. Ali G’s version of it in his 2004 Harvard commencement speech: > “You lot will become powerful people who can change de future — and you need to, coz de world at de moment iz totally f—ed…

I was reading the quote in-context, so it makes sense that it'd read differently out of context.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#375
post #54

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People can like talking to gemini, but dislike claude taking their programming job.

I was able to avoid talking to Gemini, but only by switching to DuckDuckGo and then also doctoring Chromium to run searches using a 'no-AI' option. At least I think I'm avoiding talking to Gemini, but for all I know I'm talking to it right now. This is what bugs people.

We now have an official noai Chrome Extension here: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/duckduckgo-no-ai-se...

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#376

> “The future is not yet finished. It is now your turn to shape it.” This just reads like "It's your fault if AI takes away everything you love. You clearly must have wanted it this way." Like, no? It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not the fault of the general populace if you abuse them, in other words.

> It's the responsibility of everyone implementing machine learning that it be used responsibly. It's not entirely within the power of the creators of technology to control how it is used. In our case, they actively market the technology as replacement for human intelligence, at which it fails miserably and yet companies force it through. I would love to see a more grounded frontier AI company, but beyond certain saf…

I didn't say anything about creators of technology, only implementers of technology; people using the technology that was created (however so it was).

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#377
post #8

> 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.

> Schmidt urged graduates to embrace freedom. > graduates embraced freedom and boo'd schmidt. Schmidt: No, not like that! I think that the deeper topic is that there is a sense of double-speak going around, they mean freedom but what they really mean is to use the word and its meaning and to attach it to their own goals, in this case AI because google has a vested interest in that.

Billionaires’ and businesses’ freedom to replace creative and white collar workers with obedient and 24/7-working AI.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#378
post #191

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Shouting people down isn’t “open debate”.

He was on stage and had a mic. I don’t know that the students had a lot of options to make their voices heard in the situation. And since folks like Schmidt already have access to channels to spread their opinions and this was the students’ graduation I think they get a pass.

This is exactly the meme: “I am being silenced! says the man with the microphone, book deal, and celebrity-level media access.”

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#379
post #52
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers speak for itself. What has had the same level of user growth?

If I use Google Search to do a search and I get an AI answer that I scroll past, do I count an AI user? The numbers are not reliable.

The majority of users will see the convenient answer right in front of them and stop, because their question has been answered. We've seen it again and again across industries, an an accelerating cycle: make it easy, and the users will usually do what you want.

Re: Eric Schmidt speech about AI booed during graduation

#380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason why this seems weird to you (and many other people for sure) is that current "conservative" politicians are actually more neoliberals than conservatives. So of course they will push cheap labour, offshoring, outsourcing and eventually AI. But it shouldn't be hard to understand actual conservative ideology here, since, like, it's already in the word.

You're right about conservatism as long as you take a nearly archaic definition of the word (and I lament how the definition has changed, but it is what it is). You're wrong about the other side of the aisle, though. People who are otherwise pro immigration, pro social change, pro downwards wealth redistribution, etc. (in other words, not at all conservative), are typically against AI.

>as long as you take a nearly archaic definition of the word

This is not a question of definition. Conservatism is what I wrote, period. See e.g.: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservatism/

The issue here is that most Americans no longer have any clue what it actually means, because they only associate party politics with it that are by now completely disconnected. But the definition itself has never changed.

>People who are otherwise pro immigration, pro social change, pro downwards wealth redistribution, etc. are typically against AI.

Are they? This is a pretty rigorous statement mixing in a lot of smaller ones and thus would need some actual data to back it up. I know many people I would classify as traditional "liberals" by the virtues you describe, but who are very much pro new tech and by extension, pro-AI. They are only against if they fall for the usual social media doomsayers, but from my experience they are more likely to do so the less they know or care about new technology (which in some sense directly translates to higher conservatism too I suppose).

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