Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
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Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#2Figure 1 - Former Google CEO with a vested interest in AI companies who just wants to watch the world burn tokens for the 'benefit of humanity'.
Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#3Out of touch exec commencement speeches will continue until morale improves.
Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#4Honest question, are people against AI, or against AI being solely in the hands of a few massive companies, thus concentrating wealth even more? Are people against local models as well? What if they could run Claude at home (maybe with the same power requirements as now, but maybe with much less upfront cost).
Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#5As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#6As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
Not really. Secretaries and typists aged out of the job market, Barnes and Nobles was still booming and attracted all the bookstore scorn, people still bought things in stores anyways.
Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#7As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
The dotcom boom (it wasn't a crisis) was about putting brick and mortar stores online and making shopping more convenient and price efficient. The younger generation was much more enthusiastic about shopping online, and being initial drivers of it. I remember the $25 off (no minimum order) coupons to basically get free stuff every week. The older generations still preferred to go to a store. It was a much slower progression taking 10-years for the older generations to become comfortable with shopping online.
AI is being driven by the more enthusiastic older generation (in my view) and it's not just about taking a fraction of brick and mortar sales away, it's about systematically replacing the full breadth of white collar jobs, especially the entry level jobs. You know, the jobs that college grads are vying for.
Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#8Ex-CEO of Google telling a crowd of young graduates entering society, "You will work for AI." Then trying to counter the boos with remarks like: "If you get offered a chance to ride on the rocket ship, you don't ask questions you just get on."
This is not only about AI the technology, it's the deserved anger against the privileged and powerful for their utter mismanagement of society. The youth sees through the bullshit. Good on them, there may be hope for humanity after all.
Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#9As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
During the dotcom bubble, people didn't have as much access to the internet as today (a lot of people were still using 56k dial-up modems at ~5 kilobytes/second of download speed) so the effect of online shopping on brick and mortar stores was more of a slow erosion than a sudden collapse. There was resentment and hand wringing about brick and mortar eventually but not until, I think, the late '00s and '10s when more of the world had high speed internet and smartphones were starting to take off.
Re: Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
#10As someone who's in his late 20s and didn't (consciously) witness the dotcom crisis I want to ask the older people here: was this also part of the dotcom bubble era? Were people working in bookstores angry at Amazon, people working in retail fashion angry at fashion ecommerce stores, etc?
There was some concern about Amazon in particular, but Amazon didn't eat all the bookstores until well after the dotcom boom/bust. I recall a more academic-economistically inclined friend saying that investing in Amazon now (2001) was buying a part of a future monopoly. The online stuff 1998-2003 was wimpy compared to today.