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Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

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Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#51

Post by evil-olive »

> “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you,” Schmidt responded as the boos continued. “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating … and I understand that fear.”

71 year old man with a net worth of $64 billion [0] tells a bunch of 20-somethings (many of whom have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that they will need to start repaying soon) that he understands how they feel.

yeah, I can't imagine why he got a hostile response from the crowd...

0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt

Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#52

Post by dakiol »

jstanley wrote: post #17
booleandilemma wrote: post #6

There is nothing about AI that seems like it's going to have a net positive for humanity. Faster code? Sure. Better chatbots? Sure. Textual analysis? Sure. But the downside, and it's huge, is massive unemployment and societal collapse. Nothing AI brings to the table is worth having an unemployment rate of 25% (or more). Our society is simply not ready for this. We need to rework things from the ground up, not proceed…

We've done this dozens of times before. In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them. In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity.

Who cares about productivity? Your CEO. Not you, not me. We all cannot be CEOs.

Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#53

Post by Joel_Mckay »

delecti wrote: post #9
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #3

College students are cooked for entry level work. I'm guessing there will soon be a government mandate requiring some percentage of NCGs to be hired, similar to India and other countries with huge cohorts.

Yep. I was looking for jobs the other day (because the market as a whole is kinda cooked), and one fairly small company had a half-dozen openings for Staff level engineers, and nothing else. If I'm having this much trouble with staff level experience, I can't imagine how new grads are doing.

Check your schools alumni jobs board postings, and have a look at local telecom offerings. Few will want to spend $50k in resources to train knowing you will jump to a better job in 1 year.

These people have been around a long time, and may be able to get you started:

https://www.aerotek.com/

Would also recommend talking with companies you find interesting at local trade-shows. Don't get lazy with the online gauntlet of Ads for awful jobs, scams, and AI datasets.

Best of luck, =3

Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#55

Post by seanw444 »

rybosworld wrote: post #20

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 t…

> 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.

You don't even need to be a believer in the technology to be concerned. All that matters is that the people with all the money perceive some positive outcome for their wallets from all this investment and AI hype. That is where they'll put their money. Whether or not it ends bad or good. The economy has been reshaped around a hope. Either the hope is false and the economy tanks, or the hope is realized and jobs disappear. Lose-lose.

Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#56

Post by littlexsparkee »

sidewndr46 wrote: post #37
ethanplant wrote: post #5

I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos. Everyone, and especially new grads constantly hear that AI is going to replace every job. And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?” Of course people are going to react negatively when they hear, “the machines are going to take your jobs from you. No, we don’t care how you’ll be able to pay your re…

One thing I've observed in general that certain peoples jobs are to be out of touch. If they were fully in touch with societal opinions they'd probably self censor. By being out of touch they do things that others would consider taboo and create business opportunities for the company.

the economic system rewards depravity - the more constraints you self-impose, the fewer opportunities for profit

Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#57

Post by vitally3643 »

mbgerring wrote: post #16
ethanplant wrote: post #5

I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos. Everyone, and especially new grads constantly hear that AI is going to replace every job. And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?” Of course people are going to react negatively when they hear, “the machines are going to take your jobs from you. No, we don’t care how you’ll be able to pay your re…

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…

The "I got mine, fuck you" mindset is genuinely going to be the death of the USA. It's genuinely astonishing how many people are willing to burn everything including their own house to spite random strangers.

Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#58

Post by happytoexplain »

jstanley wrote: post #50
toasty228 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity. reply Do people still believe in these fairy tales lmao? Most of the productivity gains don't go to the workers, pretty much everywhere in the developed world working hours and retirement age are going up, housing affordability is going down. You're not "much better off" https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcX... Politi…

[flagged]

Exaggerated assumptions of this magnitude are a red flag against the honesty of the position from which you are arguing.

Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#59

Post by monknomo »

Commencements are about the students, and celebrating their hard work and achievements over several years.

A common thread in these commencements with booing is that the speaker is not centering the student. They're centering AI, and talking about AI's potential, which is, at best, orthogonal to the student's potential, and possibly actively detrimental. Small wonder

Re: Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements

#60

Post by fundad »

ethanplant wrote: post #5

I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos. Everyone, and especially new grads constantly hear that AI is going to replace every job. And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?” Of course people are going to react negatively when they hear, “the machines are going to take your jobs from you. No, we don’t care how you’ll be able to pay your re…

It seems to me they are doing this for sympathy. They know how people feel about AI and big tech and do these speeches to repair their reputations, part of that is showing how mean and unfair the youths are to them.
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