> Ritter filed a lawsuit in November that alleged Schmidt, a former chief executive and chairman of Google, “forcibly raped” her while on a yacht off the coast of Mexico in 2021.
> She also claimed they had sex without her consent during the 2023 Burning Man festival in Nevada.
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.
Staying with your rapist husband/boyfriend is the norm. He might beg for forgiveness and say he won't do it again. He might say he didn't understand you when you said no. He might threaten to kill you if you open your mouth one more time. He might do all of those in the same five minute span.
Almost every women I am close to has been raped or assaulted.
What part of this do you specifically not understand?
People have different abilities. It’s often hard for people to not understand why something that’s natural to them isn’t natural to others. In some lights, humans are very similar; in other lights they can be wildly different.
I have cut multiple toxic people out of my life, even very close relationships and family, and it was easy as farting for me. It’s alien to me to not be able to do that. However it’s easy to recognize different people have different capacities in this regard.
it's a great last line; when trying to explain something to someone it behooves someone to ask a follow-up so they can clarify anything not yet answered.
A lot of people walk away from physically, mentally, or emotionally abusive relationships. I know many.
Reading the question generously, the person is asking why someone stays instead of leaves. Two of your 3 examples are emotional manipulation (big red flag, run away) and the last one is a threat to your life (big, big red flag, run away).
I think it is reasonable for someone to not understand why a person would choose to stay in that situation.
Of course, life is more nuanced than that, and the rash of pro athletes lately that have been exonerated from these accusations further muddies the waters.
Every abuser in my personal life whom I've learned about--most of whom I'd also met and spent time with before learning of their deeds--are extremely charismatic people who make active efforts to both isolate their partner from their social circle as well as do things externally that increase their reputation amongst both their peers and the peers of their partner. The people who batter, violate, and terrorize their partners are, with unusual frequency (in my experience), the same people who pick up the tab for everyone at the bar, who reliably buy people gifts, and who offer trusted advice and counsel in trying times.
Now, as to why these abusers are like this, that's a more complex thing. I'm not qualified to speak on it, but in the examples I've seen in my life, they're often people who have narcissistic personality disorder, where they're extremely attached to being seen in favorable lights by those around them, and as a result, react viciously to those who challenge that (oft fictitious) image. (This isn't always a conscious process--to put yourself into their shoes, imagine you're inextricably convinced that everyone is trying to defame you, abuse you, and tarnish your reputation at all times (which is probably true for the abuser, because in trying to prevent such fiction, they do monstrous things that fulfill that exact prophecy), so you need to constantly prevent it from happening by becoming trusted and loved by every means necessary, or else.) However, in an effort to maintain this image, they become very well-regarded by those around them, which makes the victim of their abuse sound insane when they try to call them out.
These people also frequently attach high-value people (such as the children they have with the abused) to them so that they are more difficult to harm, hold accountable, or separate from. I have never, ever heard of an abuser who didn't actively maintain an external factor that made them incredibly difficult to prosecute ("but he has kids, and the kids adore him" / "but he donates so much of his time and money to local charities" / "but he's putting X through college", etc). Putting the abused OR people the abused cares about in financial dependence with them (paying for school / rent / resources for them or their lives ones, isolating the abused from avenues to financial independence, etc) is also very common, if the abuser has such resources. Then, the abused trying to get help is made to become someone who's trying to "defame" the abuser, "rob" their loved ones of financial assistance that they depend on, "steal" the children from their father "whom the kids so love". In the abuser's mind, if their being imprisoned means someone is immediately put in harm's way by their absence, they are safe.
The opportunities for the abused to be made to feel completely insane by the world the abuser has created around them are innumerable; the goal of the abuser is to make the victim sound like a monster for trying to challenge the abuser's authority, and usually, by the time the abused catches on to the situation they're now in (during which time the abuser has been nothing but sweet and caring), the abuser has already completed the process, and that world now has extreme consequences if the abused tries to escape it. They're no longer leaving their partner--they're leaving their entire family, their friends, their finances, their entire support network, because the abuser has ingrained themselves into all of it, and done all they can to make their authority unchallengeable (or, at least, convinced the abused of such).
Combine that with the abuser very often making a habit of encouraging the abused to doubt their own judgment, telling them they're stupid or worthless (in words subtle enough that you or I would believe them), or finding people from the get go who already lack such confidence (which the abuser may not even realize is what they're doing--they're just looking for someone who doesn't seem like a threat to them, while simultaneously being incapable of believing that they, themselves, might be that threat, as a result of being blinded by their own narcissism. Which is another factor--how do you convince someone they're being harmful when they're incapable of believing that they have the capacity to harm? The abusers often believe the same lies they tell their victims, and tell them with unwavering conviction.)
Do you have anyone in your life who you hold in very high esteem, whom you are very close to, who you've also heard ill of? When has your gut response been to believe the person speaking ill of them, instead of your trusted, caring, friend, who you've known for years, who would "never do such a thing"? It might be someone so close to you that believing their victim would feel like buying into a conspiracy theory--which is exactly the circumstance that the abuser is trying to maintain.
There is an equally impressive ability of abusers to rewrite history to put themselves in the role of the victim. That comes along with justifying all sorts of behavior. The classic "if you didn't make me so angry I wouldn't hit you" is logic that adds up to them.
If you are curious enough to read a book about this and related questions, Unspeakable Things by Brooke Nevils (who accused Matt Lauer) really opened my eyes on this.
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 questions", but we all get the message you are sending here.
Like you, I am not much of a fan of victim-blaming, but you're reading the post in an extremely negative light. The poster literally concludes with "I just don't understand it." A more charitable way to interpret this statement is "please help me understand."
The first part of your response is informative, and I thought "interesting response." The second part is just nasty and I thought "wow, what a **." Do you want the poster to understand or do you just want to score points?
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
81% of women have been sexually harassed, at least 20% have been raped. Yet, weirdly, that hasn't changed the allocation of capital in the United States in their collective favor.
But let's see what kind of person you actually are. Do you have a problem with suing, post-rape? What kind of society would you consider ideal?
Keep in mind that the current criminal case closure rate of rape cases is 25% and has been dropping for the last 10 years.
Uh huh. Or just noting Cash Rules Everything Around Me. Which I doubt was a fact lost on the complaintant - which if the crime occurred, might indeed make the circumstances worse eh?
Which, notably, none of what you are saying even addresses eh?
Do you think Trump has gotten where he is because these things are not happening?
> Do you think Trump has gotten where he is because these things are not happening?
I don't even understand what you're trying to claim here. As best I can figure out, it sounds like you're saying that Trump made his money from suing people for sexual assault, but that's so absurd I can't even imagine someone trying to claim that as a troll.
Even ignoring that, your argument seems to be "people in general are motivated by money, therefore this specific instance of a person acting where money could plausibly be a motivation is the only possible explanation". It informs quite a bit about how you view the world, but it's not a particularly compelling explanation.
People with a lot of money often get away with things for several reasons, including;
1) people sometimes attack/slander/harass others for arbitrary reasons hoping to get some of it (even if they never have to actually pay them!)
2) ability to hire people to professionally defend them (lawyers, PR people, etc.)
3) their often extensive networks among people in power (often in groups #1 and #2!), which can result in decisions going ‘their way’ even without having to take explicit action - but if they want, allowing them to take explicit action.
4) their ability to absorb extensive financial penalties without actual harm to their style of living, allowing them to be more risk tolerant.
5) they often own things (like newspapers, media outlets, companies), which can make most peoples lives hard if power is applied.
This means most people are hesitant to cross them, as normal folks can likely be crushed. This includes many people like police, public prosecutors, journalists, civil servants, etc. It’s ‘leverage’, and ‘power’.
So for most people, especially if they keep getting what they need, it’s not worth rocking the boat. You’re more likely to just get steamrolled/destroyed if you try. some people will even actively encourage it, as long as it seems like it will pay out. most people caught in this situation will ‘grin and bear it’, hoping to get out ‘alive’ and avoid further contact.
If you’re already being pushed out/fired, you’re already more in the direction of being ‘destroyed’, so the additional consequences of trying to fight are less. And at that point, it’s clear it won’t pay out as much going the other direction.
It’s sex realpolitik + money - and I’m sure anyone in that circle is quite familiar with it. Both the complaintant, and the defendant. Why make a scene if it’s in your financial/safety interest not too, after all? Especially if you’ll likely lose.
If you have not as much to lose, why not make a scene?
If you are a victim of an actual crime or not is a lot less tangential to this calculus than anyone wants to think about, but it’s true.
Notably, a LOT of people will also retroactively cast consensual behavior into non-consensual later, if it is also in their financial or social interest, which further muddies the waters.
After all, were you there when this event potentially happened? Was it rape? Sexual harassment? Was it a half sprung trap?
Good luck knowing for sure if you weren’t, or sometimes even if you were!
> So for most people, especially if they keep getting what they need, it’s not worth rocking the boat. You’re more likely to just get steamrolled/destroyed if you try. some people will even actively encourage it, as long as it seems like it will pay out.
> ...
> Both the complaintant, and the defendant. Why make a scene if it’s in your financial/safety interest not too, after all? Especially if you’ll likely lose.
This is what I'm still stuck on. You're making a strong claim about of what a specific individual's mindset was about a traumatic event based on broad generalizations of social dynamics. It's hard to imagine how you could have such high confidence that someone you've never met has an exact combination of motivation from money and self-preservation to end up acting in ways you'd predict, rather than any number of other plausible explanations.
Seriously, I just skimmed that LA Times article and wondering why isn't HN discussing this claim made by her?
quote: "She further alleged that Schmidt had built a “backdoor” to Google servers with a team of company engineers that allowed him to spy on her and anyone with a Google account."
Why can't that ever be talent, or wisdom, or passion? So many filthy rich people. Seem to instantly go "hmm, what's some illegal stuff I can do despite so many legal things available to me".
I'm sure all the above happened back in the day too, but: rich people of previous centuries would go to the arts to find meaning. Being part of an orchestra or theatre troupe or artist alley was a peak achievement. Now we just have boring dystopia where rich guys literally build bunkers for the end of days they are personally bringing about. What the hell happend?
It's a common issue. When you got everything you could possibly want in life or have enough money to buy whatever you want... then for quite a lot of people of either gender, the illegal and illicit becomes the next thing to obtain.
For some, it's an increasingly worrisome amount (and type of) drugs, for others, it's women, and for a select few it's children.
> When you got everything you could possibly want in life or have enough money to buy whatever you want... then for quite a lot of people of either gender, the illegal and illicit becomes the next thing to obtain.
But with a society that empowers men more than women, and relative power disparities of all types lending themselves to behavior like this (plenty of people who don't have everything still have enough power to exploit those they have power over). In the abstract, sure, it might not be something inherent to men, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that in practice women are victimized by behavior like this at a system level that men are not.
To any men who are dubious about this, I'd genuinely suggest asking the women who you have close enough relationships with to be comfortable having tough discussions if they'd be willing to tell you about experiences they've had where men have behaved poorly towards them in ways that wouldn't have likely happened to a man in their circumstances; I'm guessing that pretty much all of them will have experienced far more than you'd imagine. As a man, I'm relatively certain I can't recall any instance of ever experiencing the reverse of this though, and that's my point: going out of your way to try to frame this as a gender-neutral issue basically emphasizes theoretical concerns at the expense of the actual distribution of problems that people face in real life. When things are so slanted that in practice almost everyone in one group has experienced it but relatively few from another group has had the same experience, framing it in terms of that is important.
> But with a society that empowers men more than women, and relative power disparities of all types lending themselves to behavior like this (plenty of people who don't have everything still have enough power to exploit those they have power over). In the abstract, sure, it might not be something inherent to men, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that in practice women are victimized by behavior like this at a system level that men are not.
A valid and important point, yes. But then there's Ghislaine Maxwell. By all accounts, she is just as guilty as he was, some say even worse because she actively recruited victims for him.
The fact that society gives less women that kind of power reduces the absolute number of women that abuse their power - but the level of depravity they can sink to those that do rise to power is just as bad as men's.
I feel like the existence of victims of women doesn't detract from the overall point I was making, which is that overall the distribution of people who exploit people like this is overwhelmingly tilted towards men being the dominant source. The fact that you can point to specific counterexamples as a distraction from this is exactly what I'm trying to argue against being useful. For any significant source of mistreatment of an oppressed group in history (which I won't bother calling out examples of because they will readily come to mind), there were likely some members of the oppressed group who took part or at least didn't stand up for the others, but equating that with being the overall source of the mistreatment is at best misguided and at worst actively muddying the waters.
At least the claim of Eric having a secret backdoor to Google servers letting him spy on whoever he wants seems unlikely. If he was spying on her putting spyware on her devices seems much more likely.
There is no proof. She can retroactively at any point say she did not give consent to extract money. She was with him two years after the first time she was “raped”. She’s the only one that has made any such claims about him.
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.
I think it might be because some folks from the older generation have a sense of entitlement...mostly because they often lived through a glorious period that en masse has been beneficial to them...They expected flying cars, etc...So, now, this time they'll get their AI servants...So, its sort of an expectation (for some from this older generation) that the world will keep giving them lots of good (well, good for them!) things in life.
My sincere apologies if my comments are offensive to anyone (of any age group)...but i do agree that I'm seeing way more older people in support of the AI evolution, and many many more younger people fearing it. My age is far closer to the older generation, but lots of times, i'm feeling what i see lots of younger folks feeling: fear.
I think it's much less about generation than about material conditions. It's easier to convince someone that AI is going to be good for their bottom line if they are already retired, or at least have a significant chunk of savings (and therefore investments) and a job higher up the food chain/org chart than a new college grad does. For most working class people, age is a necessary but not sufficient condition to have these things, but there are plenty of older workers who are feeling the fear as well.
Yeah, i agree that there might be older folks also fearing AI - i'm one of them! :-)
As to your point about likely being more due to material conditions rather than age, perhaps you're right....but, then again, on average I'd say the older generation tends to have better material conditions/positions, tends to have at least some savings (maybe retirement, or at least will have more solvent social security, etc.?)...than say young folks who started graduating college from around the great recession to about now? So, maybe we're both right???
Yeah, I didn't mean to be argumentative, but I hate that issues like this are frequently framed as generational conflicts when they're really class conflicts. There are a lot of people that benefit from erasing the whole concept of class conflict from the public consciousness (though there are many many more that would benefit from the opposite!).
The article we're commenting on lists several examples of the dynamic and it aligns with my personal experience offline and online. There are also stats like these:
>"Publishers 45 and over were more likely to use AI than those under 45."
There's probably some skew here where old people in general aren't typically on substack, and therefore of the old people who are on substack, they're more "on the cutting edge" than younger publishers, which don't have such skew.
>"Younger Americans are generally more likely than older Americans to think the increased use of AI will worsen human abilities."
Right but what about actual usage? Young believe social media is bad for them, but nonetheless use it.
I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.
Every time there is push back from younger posters followed by a bit of a generational faceoff.
I think boomers are still inclined to see technology as exciting space-race stuff. As a millennial I remember when the Internet was good but that also feels like a distant memory.
For younger people technology has been dark patterns and skinner boxes and increasingly imposed on them against their will from COVID tela-learning to AI mandates.
>I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.
No, old people just don't bother hiding it, even though they use it less.
CEOs are hired by boards. Boards are hired by shareholders. Most publicly-traded American companies have their shares held by pension and retirement funds. Pension and retirement funds exist to send money to people over 55.
I'm sure VPs are sweating bullets over the instructions they will receive during the part of the shareholder's call where mutual fund managers dial their members and hold the phones up to each other.
I know you're trying to reduce it to absurdity, but there's still pressure to make their members happy. The fund managers are under the same competitive pressure as anyone else and are incentivized to get the best possible returns for their clients. If they don't, the members leave and take their money to another fund that is better at making money.
By that definition anything that happens in politics or corporate america is "fervently pushed by people over 55", because that's the group with the most political and economic power. AI push? Boomers. Datacenter backlash? Boomers. ESG push? Boomers. ESG backlash? Boomers.
I know that there's backlash and push on each issue from every age range, but people ultimately vote with their wallets. They're sending their money to people who get them the most money regardless of what they think on an issue.
I know you're trying to reduce it to absurdity, but that's not what I'm saying you're doing, and I think you know it.
I'm saying people chase returns. If you find out that one mutual fund is going to give you reasonably higher returns than your current mutual fund, you're likely to at least consider the option of switching to that competing mutual fund, regardless of how they get the increased returns.
Multiply that times a few dozen million people and you start to see some effects on the economy, like laying off workers in favor of using AI.
And I’m saying that there’s so many dots to connect to reach your conclusion that it becomes no conclusion at all, let alone having much to do with the decision-making of oldsters.
It's almost as if this is a complex system of human behavior and incentives that spans an entire society. That being said, if you pay attention to what's going on, it's fairly obvious to see.
Gens Y and Z make up the largest population cohort in the US by size, but hold only 10.5% of total wealth in the US. Baby Boomers hold about half. [0]
Baby Boomers are of retirement age. That means that many of them are drawing off of retirement accounts. Since you can't save for retirement without compensating for inflation, you have to find ways to grow the money. Most people do this through investments backed by stocks and bonds.
Stocks and bonds derive their value from the labor of the people working at the organizations that issued the stocks and bonds. More and more, those people aren't Baby Boomers. They're retired.
So that money is coming from people who are still working: Gens X, Y, and Z.
To increase returns on those stocks and bonds, you have to reduce the amount of money going to the people doing the work so that they can go to shareholders. Those shareholders are often people with retirement accounts.
Folks of retirement age or nearing it are largely free to either play with it or not depending on their interest. This segment may present as largely positive if those without interest get to just opt out.
For folks in the middle of their career or earlier, or just starting out, it's more of a labor vs capital thing where capital doesn't care if skills that have been invested in are devalued, and raises expectations where skills are amplified. This segment will likely present as largely negative.
Younger still, high school and earlier, probably fairly free again to play with it or not depending on interest, but subject to temptation to use it to cheat, and subject to teacher influence not to.
> The future does not simply arrive. It gets built in laboratories, in dormitories, in startups, in classrooms, in legislators, and the people building it will be you and people like you.
This prompts you to say:
> 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.
This doesn't seem like an accurate read on what the Eric Schmidts of the world think.
Oh don't you know? The young people don't know how to use technology any more. They've never had computers they control. The new hires and the nearly retired have the same computer skils.
Locked down OS iPad kids don't know how to use computers because the manufactures and their parents wouldn't let them.
The Matrix' 1999 "peak of human civilization" wasn't wrong, the world is moving to a society built by a small number of wizards owned by billionaires.
> Globally, the share of respondents who say AI products and services offer more benefits than drawbacks rose from 55% in 2024 to 59% in 2025, even as the share saying these products make them nervous increased to 52%.
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 Schmidt were hired by boards, who were elected by shareholders, with the hope that they'd increase returns. The biggest shareholders in most American companies are pension and retirement funds, followed by funds that are not necessarily retirement funds but are often used by individuals to back IRAs and 401(k)s.
When the executives of Schmidt's generation were hired, they were incentivized with stock options instead of cash. Their compensation was directly tied to how much money was returned to shareholders.
When you maximize a return to a shareholder, you do that by minimizing the costs of the inputs to the business. One of those costs is labor. Payroll, benefits, the costs of the office space people work in, etc.
GenAI offers shareholders - which can be seen as synonymous with people who are approaching retirement or who are retirees - a promise of massively reducing labor costs. In the minds of a lot of institutional investors, they could have companies where the same amount of value is created with only c-suite and executive-level employees working with teams of AI agents that, over time, will become cheaper and cheaper. What was once hundreds or thousands of employees is now a few dozen.
Now, where does this leave young and middle-aged people? In a place where they have a wildly uncertain future. But that's not the retiree's problem. They want the villa on the golf course in Florida, and by the time you have real social problems resulting from a population with no hope for the future, the retirees will be dead or too old to care.
Schmidt's cohort, for their part, have enough money to deal with those problems in the near to mid-term. Or, at least, they think they do.
EDIT:
Love getting downvoted for what is, essentially, a factual statement.
Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for.
“Factual statement“, that’s hilarious. Nothing wrong with an op-ed, but with an opening like that you might want to step back and re-examine those “facts”.
OP wrote it poorly, but isn't wrong. Most retires get income from a few places: Social Security, 401K, or rental property.
Social security is a direct transfer of money from people currently working to people no longer working. The amount you get is vaguely based on how much you earned when you worked, but it's not like the money you paid in went into a savings account for you. It went to the people who were already retired. Remember, the first recipients of SS never paid in anything. It's been a long chain of working paying non-working ever since.
401k's are usually based on stocks. The value of stocks is based on the labor of the people who work at the company. The dividends and interest come from that labor too. Once again, at one point you were that labor, but your labor was going to retired people, and now it's "your turn".
And rental income comes from people giving you the money they get from their labor. You used your labor to buy the house, but the current money comes from their labor.
Now the rest of what they are saying is flawed because two of those three would go away if AI replaced all labor. But they are correct in saying that your cashflow in retirement comes from other people's labor, just as your labor went to other people when you were working.
Let's say you take 10% of each paycheck, withdraw it as cash, and put it in a safe in my basement from my first paycheck to my last one 40 years later. The safe is a safe. It earns no interest. No one else contributes to the monetary value of the contents of the safe in any way.
The 40 years are up. You need to pay for groceries. You go down to my basement and behold the fruits of four decades of toil. You take some of it to the grocery store... and it takes up a far, far larger percentage of your cash pile than you thought it would.
Inflation got you. In fact, if we're talking about 40 years ending this last April, it shaved 66.6% off of the purchasing power of the money in that safe.
Uh oh.
So how do you deal with inflation? Instead of putting your money in a safe, you put it in a retirement account. That retirement account creates wealth for you by investing your money into equities, bonds, and other assets.
Equities and bonds typically grow in value by backing the asset with the surplus value generated by the labor of the people who are doing work for the entity that issued the equity or the bond.
Could you also invest in assets that don't get their returns off of other people's labor? Of course, but most retirement accounts in the US today do not do this.
So, yes, you're living off of money that you did not labor for, at least after you exhaust the inflation-adjusted value of the principal you put up for your retirement savings.
Your argument is a bit flawed though. Most retires get income from a few places: Social Security, 401K, or rental property.
401k's will do great with AI replacing all labor. But social security will disappear and so will rental income, because no one will be able to afford housing anymore.
Most 401(k)s are backed by stocks and bonds. At least in the short term, yes, they'll do great as labor costs shrink in relation to the money earned by selling goods and services. However, if you have fewer and fewer people able to consume because they no longer have income, well, then you have the same problem as you do with housing and social security.
People say that universal basic income is a fix, but let's be honest: employers don't pay people more than they absolutely have to right now, and that's with most of the value earned for the employers being provided by people doing actual work for them. What makes anyone think they'll gladly cough up for those who don't work for them, especially at an amount that will allow most people's standard of living to either remain steady or improve?
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.
> 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.
Since inflation was a thing, so since ever.
If you take the money you labored for and put it in an account without accruing any sort of interest, you will have exactly what you earned to live off of without working.
Since that happens over a span of decades - let's say forty years - that needs to account for the reduction in value brought about by inflation. You offset that using interest generated by loans issued by the institution that operates the account (which is not you laboring) or by returns from owning equities (which is the output of other people's labor).
I suppose the gold bars you mention could rise in value enough to offset inflation without resorting to taking a slice of someone else's economic output, but that's not how most retirement accounts are backed.
> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.
We also have the problem that a lot of people at the beginning and middle of their lives don't have the standard of living that their parents had despite doing all of the "right" things.
> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.
Gen Z and majority of millennials are completely unsympathetic to this problem.
From their perspective, older generations have actively hindered their careers and financial opportunities to the point where they know they'll have to work their entire lives. They also know the US is marching towards financial calamity when Medicare becomes insolvent in the early 2030s, and don't anticipate Medicare or Social Security to exist when they're older.
Elaborating on this viewpoint: those seniors also had their chance to save for retirement in the cushiest and most prosperous economy of all time. If they didn't choose to do that because they wanted to party or "find themselves", that's on them, and they still got to live it up for cheap while simultaneously removing the ability of future generations to do the same. No millennial or gen Z is going to care that they didn't bother to save a few bucks in a time when houses and college cost as much as a McChicken.
Obviously there are exceptions, but that's the general perception.
This is not even close to the reality on the ground. But America’s enemies would be smacking their lips and rubbing their hands together imagining a regressive youth.
My own conspiracy theory is that AI, and the increasingly authoritarian government swings, are the Boomer generation's last shot at freezing the world in time and ensuring our world is shaped to their vision long after they're all gone. The thing that generation fears the most is that we're all going to just move on from them when they're dead, and finally progress past this "1970-2020" economic/cultural stasis that we've been stuck in for basically my entire life.
A lot of the cultural changes that were achieved are actively being fought against and are slowly being reversed. Seems like every few weeks there is something from the civil rights era being chipped away at.
I grew up in the 90s in Europe. Back then Europe had strong consumer protection, pretty strong worker protection, low entry jobs still payed a bunch, cheap housing (my single parent mom was able to buy a flat while working at a gas station at the age of 23).
Today’s Europe is nothing but austerity, there is no consumer protection left, they’ve split the society by having “jobs that only immigrants want” (i.e. insultingly low paying jobs), nobody can buy a flat anymore unless they’re a 10 year senior at a tech company.
Today’s Europe is exactly the kind of world I always imagine the 1970s to be like. The only exception is in the 1970s Europe had a strong communist or socialist opposition which actively fought for a better world with strikes every week (or at least that is how I read European history).
I think you stated better what i was trying to babble in another comment here. :-)
And you might think it is a conspiracy theory...but the sentiment i'm seeing (obviously a limited data set to only folks i engage with) seems to align so much to it...that if not fully true, *feels* quite close to it - even if not an intentional thing.
> Tennessee State University suggested AI was "rewriting production as we sit here" and told his audience to "deal with it" as they jeered him in response.
Guess it doesn't take much to see what's under the mask.
Yeah, people in art production are far far more negative about AI than most sceptical developers.
I wouldn't be surprised if a huge percentage of concept artists are out of jobs or changing specialization these days (Creating a throwaway image for a pitch or imaging document can probably be as easily conveyed through a prompt and the people looking at them are probably often not savvy enough to appreciate the difference).
Where the music industry goes will be interesting, knowledgeable musicians are way too into fiddling/toying to feel any need for AI tools, but since music is pretty much an industry these days fed by promotion, it isn't far fetched that bedroom "AI" artists can leapfrog established ones.. the question is if it'll stick if they can't reach the pinnacles (megahits is part of it, but concerts still seem to matter quite a bit, and an AI won't help you perform even if Milli Vanilli might disagree).
As one who isn't a musician but loves listening to music, the emergence of passable genAI-generated music means that I can't trust new music anymore.
The only new music I'm willing to buy is music that I've seen the artists perform live, or is from established artists that I know and trust are keeping it human.
I have no idea how rare or common my perspective on this is, but it's not impossible that the music industry may see a decline as a result.
I dont get this. Youre so morally opposed to AI music that youre afraid of listening to new stuff in fear of accidentally liking something made with/by AI?
For people who see art as human expression, AI generated music/literature/art is offensive. If they can't trust the artwork to be produced by a human being, they risk being betrayed.
Maybe it's a silly analogy, but you wouldn't buy unlabelled eggs in a supermarket if you are against cage farming because you don't want to accidentally support it.
"jazz is music; swing is business" - Duke Ellington
So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while the musicians will continue to music and who knows maybe the rent will be covered.
The most jarring thing for me is that artists tend to be the most "communally oriented, socially forward" group of people. I've definitely spent my fair time around them.
As soon as tools came about that socialized their skill, opened it to everyone, they immediately and violently opposed it. Which is totally understandable, except when your core ideology you have been pushing for your whole life is to socialize everything.
The hypocrisy is so suffocating that it was like a 9.0 earthquake in my moral landscape.
And yes, before you come at my throat, free local image generation tools get no hatred exemption.
“Why bother making art when the slopbox can just extrude some art for you?”
Gee, I wonder why artists have such negative reactions to this technology. I’m actually baffled by your comment to the point where I have to wonder if you’re posting in good faith.
Being community oriented is easy when it basically means recruiting new customers (ie listeners). And though some of those become competitors (ie learn to play an instrument) the process is long and slow and arduous and so very few actually follow through.
But anybody can buy a Suno subscription in no time at all.
Some say that the only "real" string music comes from a Stradivarius, because the Chinese violins have no master craftsmanship with centuries of legacy behind them.
I'd say gatekeeping "real" behind faux barriers is regressive, but a lot of "progressives" seem to disagree...
- you all like music enough to go to a four year program and spend lots of money to study it.
- you all probably have been creating music since you were a child and really love it.
- well....
- people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.
- we now have a magic button that can make content by ripping off every previous artist we've trained our models on.
- now that everyone has access to this magic button, music has become even more worthless and the only people that'll make money from it are the people running the streaming services like spotify.
- if you do happen to create some original content, we'll just suck it into our giant copy machine and use it to out you you.
- good luck, have fun, and make sure to pay those student loans back.
> - people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.
This is the big thing that artists are going through right now.
They're realizing that most consumers of art don't care about the process or the artist. They just want music as background noise, or an aesthetically pleasing picture on their wall.
I wanted to listen to heavy metal songs about office life. I'm not going to spend years learning how to play guitar in order to record it, not to mention that I have a voice fit for old school silent movies. I'm certainly not going to spend money on commissioning a song. But 5 minutes in ChatGPT to write and refine some lyrics, followed by 15 minutes in Suno playing with various prompts, and eventually I got "Per My Last Email"[0], and I was happy.
Let the musicians rage against my shortcut. I don't care. Let them rage against some notion of "quality" and how AI doesn't provide it. Don't care, it's good enough for me.
As long as it's for personal use you don't publish it on a streaming platform or try to make money off of it, there is no problem as far as I'm concerned.
The issue is really the people who fill the streaming platforms with slop to make a quick buck, drowning out the real artists and producers in the process. (As if the Spotify model wasn't already bad enough for artists...)
The think your last sentence hits the nail on the head: it's good enough for YOU. You've essentially made a novelty song, and I don't believe you're going to be listening to it for years.
The problem is when people spend 20 minutes prompting up a song and then attempt to make a career out of slop, and in the process drown out all the new creative works that aren't just remixed slop.
As the GP, I actually agree. I will never claim to have written the song, and I generally try to avoid claiming I "made" the song unless I include the "with Suno" caveat. I prefer to say that I "generated" the song.
> I told a waiter in a restaurant what I wanted to eat, and I got it. But I did not make the food : )
Then can we also stop giving credit to CEOs for the products their company makes? Elon Musk doesn't make EVs or rocket ships.
Lots of people eat McDonald's but that doesn't mean it's good for you and will support your nutritional goals, or even that it's good food which tastes good.
If you want to listen to nothing but slop I can't stop you.
Music was already worthless. Here's Deadmau5 giving advice to aspiring producers in 2012:
> You need to make a world. So you have a rollercoaster in your backyard. And it’ll be the hot thing in the neighborhood for about a week. But once everyone’s had a go… they’ll lose interest, go home n play Sega instead. What you need then, is a fuckin’ theme park… and you AND your music are the theme. People come into your theme park…..check out all this shit… buncha rides, no 2 the same, some merch here and there, special events, dolphins through hoops and all that whack shit. You want people to come to your theme park and feel like they’re a part of this world of yours.
Franz Lizst was a rockstar in 1840 because he could write and play the piano really well. But culture and technology has progressed.
A popstar today can usually sing, dance, write, produce, act. They're business people with a marketing vision and gimmicks to go with it. Polymath performers, creators, and multi-instrumentalists. Technology marches forward and the next generation of artists will be those who adapt the tools available.
We're certainly losing something culturally. Just like this guy[1], who spent 1906 lamenting that the mechanical music machine (phonograph) will ruin music, was somewhat right in his prediction that fewer and fewer people would learn instruments and sing well.
"Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? ... When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery? Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression?"
When I was a really young kid, I used to hum to myself with a buzzing sound to try and copy the early EDM sounds I grew up listening to. I went on to do electronic music production myself. (And that love of electronic music was the fuel that kept me interested in learning classical piano, jazz, music history and more, and why I still have a piano next to my desk now).
Personally, I'm excited to see what the next generation art and artists end up looking like.
For the readers who are not aware: John Philip Sousa is, of course, not just some random guy, but the most famous composer of US-American marching music ("The Stars and Stripes Forever", "Washington Post March", etc.) I didn't know that he wrote essays for magazines.
This is really a fascinating document of a bygone era! Thanks for sharing!
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 wealth gap in the population, possible a war, the country is tearing apart... But why so anti AI specifically?
Because society is structured so that every time some labor-saving innovation comes along, it's used as a tool to drive down wages and reduce workers' bargaining power. And they leaders of these industries aren't exactly hiding it.
You might be able to game it in the short term, but It's not like anyone is seriously thinking this will reduce the totality of our efforts in the long term. Employers are already champing at the bit to reduce headcount and increase output targets.
The only hope these people have to offer in their bleak future is that if you play your cards right, you might be one of the few crabs to climb over the other crabs and escape the bucket before it's dumped into the kettle. It's giving "we need one person from each department to stay on and train the India team after the layoffs" vibes.
Yep. In theory, labor saving innovation (or handing jobs off overseas) should be a joyous occasional all. It could be a joyous occasion for all. But we have structured it so that, the moment it happens, 200% of the benefits go to capital and -100% go to labor -- and the consolation prize for labor is that maybe some of the 200% will trickle down into a different job later, or willingness to spend on overpriced haircuts, or something.
There's an argument to be made that this is a necessary component of an economy that can reinvent itself. Maybe. But even if we accept this convenient and self-serving and suspicious premise, there can then be no concession on the point that structuring it this way creates an obligation on the part of the person receiving 200% to "spread it around" and that attempts to dodge this obligation are morally repugnant, socially unacceptable, and ought to be met with harsh political backpressure.
For the last while, that hasn't been the thinking. Instead we have gone for "blame mexicans and let's see if we can't make it 300%!" The response of the kids gives me hope that people might be coming back to their senses on the matter.
There's an argument to be made that this is just part of a repeating cycle of history. Powerful people have always, will always, and are currently using their power to make themselves more powerful - no matter whether the power takes the form of nobility titles, currency, or company directorships. History consists of a continuous gradual increase in "top 1% wealth" punctuated by sharp decreases.
I agree, this is a reason to boo the (tech) elites. But they seem to boo genAI specifically, right? I'd understand it if they'd just started booing right from the first word.
A national average (which is what an inflation rate is) can only do so much. It's going to include people who spend very different amounts on housing, probably not much like the situation where you live.
No, the "averages smear out details" problem is completely separate to the core accusation I made and much less interesting. My accusation -- which you completely failed to address -- is that CPI systematically fails to account for forced substitution, introducing a systematic downwards bias that forces "real" incomes to rise over the long term as a direct result of the solvency constraint on individuals rather than improved access to goods and services in the economy.
Rent goes up more than pay. Solvency = the belt must tighten. You decide to eat chicken instead of beef because it isn't inflating as fast and it's good enough. The basket adjusts to model your "preference change." Inflation went down! Your real income went up! Wow amazing!
In the short term, basket adjustments are lagged and modest in impact, but in the long term they are everything. CPI is a good model of consumer price inflation vs last year but a terrible model when compounded. This is before going down the chained CPI and hedonic adjustment tangents, which both reliably adjust CPI in the wrong direction. Funny how all the dubious methodology points in one direction, that of understating inflation.
Worse, the very focus on consumer prices itself is highly misleading. Assets and liabilities matter in an economy that has a middle class and isn't just hand-to-mouth serfs. When assets inflate and paychecks don't and the response is dissaving and debt, that's a problem too. The American Dream isn't to Owner's Imputed Rent a house.
Innovation can make specific skills obsolete; but only if the output of the process actually gets cheaper or better...
It results in the output becoming available to people at a lower price point.
It's not some artificial social system like unions guilds or cartels, it's a tangible thing that actually produces more output with less (or different) workers.
If the tech CEO dream that they are selling that LLMs replace all white collar work within a few years who is going to have money to buy anything at the lower price point?
>so you can all have the exact job you trained for
Couldn't be any more ironic than being delivered at a graduation ceremony. An equal message could be:
"You know all that time, effort and money you just spent learning something over the last few years? It's useless now. Lamo. Congrats on wasting your life."
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 their lives learning is going to have little to no value to employers. It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
It's like you just spent 4 years learning to sequence with gels, and now someone is telling you that was a waste of time, and you should just stop complaining and deal with it.
But aren't we all going through this? I'm going through it, sadly I'm lacking the plasticity of a young mind!
I know I'm being privileged, but not by much, I'm self employed and the world is changing like crazy and it scares me as well, how will I gather my income in a year (luckily I do live in a "socialist" country, but not so socialist for entrepreneurs)? No idea, but I set up Open Claw and Claude Code and it's opening my eyes to different ways of doing things. The primitives to do this are the same as always (Linux). Sure, if you're doing medicine you won't know how to do this, but you never did, you relied on people like me/us.
Well, perhaps the only difference between me and the younglings is that over time I've come to trust my intellect. I'll deal with it, as they say.
Btw, if you're really suggesting that "this time it's different" (as in AI is different from electricity, the internet, ubiquitous computing), then you agree with the elites: you're going to have to deal with it, the genie is out of the box and it happened faster than ever.
I'll add again, they the younglings have many reason to boo the tech elites, and I'd join them if I were there, I'm just trying to understand what is exactly going on in the minds of our precious new generation, this is important (Hey, I watched Altered Carbon!).
I think it's simply the fact that there hasn't even been an opportunity for the youth to start, it's just misery right from the start. there's no "it'll get better" in that frame of mind
and I'm in a similar situation, although I'm younger
and I do think in a way this time is different, because AI by nature is very "generic", its not just one domain, rather everything is affected
plus there is a kind of mindset that the youth is entitled and that thank God we don't have to hire them anymore etc etc. it doesn't help.
and even though I believe things will get better, the question is "when" and if there will be a new "lost generation" or whatever.
maybe that makes sense? on one hand I'm able to do way more, but I also know what that means at least in the short term. I don't know where the demand will be to meet this new exponential supply.
You're right. Ali Alkhatib believes that AI is a political project intended to shift power and agency away from individuals and organizations and toward centralized power structures. Now, ordinary people must figure out a way forward, because they have fewer and fewer cards to play.
> 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.
So, if a slave owner who owns a plantation and has a bunch of enslaved workers gets a new fertilizer that increases production per acre by 200%, that is good for the slaves?
To your edit, it's because the commencement speakers are praising AI and probably not praising the Iran war, the wealth gap, or high housing prices. I would imagine if a commencement speaker did praise those things they would get boo-ed too.
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 to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.
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.
Because the manager/owner/techbro class has decided we don't need employees for anything anymore, AI can do it all. This is phenomenally untrue, but that doesn't help you pay off your $400K of student loans or buy a house.
To me it's a tool. It helps me accomplish my goals with less effort. That's the definition of a tool right? What is AI to you then? Perhaps I'm being dumb, but not sarcastic.
A large crop harvester is a tool, but if you used to work on a farm by hand it's not a tool you're going to get to use. It's a replacement for your labour and value, right? someone else will get to use the tool and earn money.
So the question is in what way ai is a tool to these kids.
The harvester is super expensive, using an LLM is not.
Who’s to say AI is not a democratizing force? Like the Internet? And book printing before that? Suddenly we all have a Personal Assistant, suddenly we can all build tools to make the computer do what we want.
Hey where is Stephen Fry with his podcasts when you need him!
The direct and unambiguous purpose of AI as a tool has been to replace labor and treat workers badly. This is not some doomsaying thing. This is literally what CEOs and billionares creating and pushing this shit have openly discussed and shared with reporters (who proceed to publish the quotes 100% uncritically and with no investigative sense of curiosity to ask further questions about it). They are excited at the idea that AI means they can cull millions and millions of jobs.
They can’t be so stupid to think that there is anyone left to extract value form when that happens.
Either we find something better to do than work for -or glue our eyeballs to the products off- our tech overlords or they go down with us. (I used that dash myself thank you).
So, the people who are saying "it's just a tool" are trying to imply that it's just like an electric drill vs a hand drill, and all that will happen is that people will switch to the better tool and get much more productive and that's it!
Any maybe that's where we are today, but AI is rapidly improving and while we don't know what's going to happen there's very clearly a real possibility that instead of just people doing the same jobs but with a better tool, that tool will actually completely replace their jobs. Maybe a significant fraction of the jobs in society. That's no mere tool.
You are missing the point of why AI is being hated so much. Sequencing was just a tool for you that made your job easier. Right now it almost feels like CEOs can't wait to use AI to fire everyone
It helps that research assignments have a certain amount of people-power available, to which amplifiers increase the work done. Many businesses have a certain amount of work to be done, so amplifiers reduce the people needed.
That's not even accounting for AI's unique ability to trick CEOs.
How to deal with it. Spitting "deal with it" at the audience just says he was so unprepared that he didn't even realize he was literally hired to give them that send-off guidance. But being skilled and notable in a field doesn't make people insightful.
Because people like Eric Schmidt are constantly talking about how AI is going to make the careers they just spent 6 figures learning to do obsolete.
How delusional do you have to be to give a pro-AI speech to the generation most likely to be directly fucked over by AI if your other predictions are true?
It's a college graduation speech, he's not required to touch on any specific topics.
"AI is going to upend your nascent adulthood and career" is pretty tone-deaf when delivered by a semi-retired billionaire who was was neck-deep in a conspiracy to reduce wages in his industry barely 20 years ago.
Tech execs made choices that made the public hostile to AI. They told everyone they were going to lose their jobs a not participate in the upside (implication: they get all the wealth). They cozied up to a corrupt administration that stripped public benefits while enriching themselves (now from tax dollars). They forced towns to accept environmentally toxic data centers that take their water/power
We’re all going to suffer the economic consequences of being left behind in AI (and other fields) all because execs wanted to double down on privatize the gains / socialize the losses.
Totally. As I've commented elsewhere, they thought it would be a great time screwing over artists and other culture works to make quick bucks and outrun the law.
Turns out that culture workers are a big chunk of who sets the narrative for the mainstream, and especially younger generations.
There was an effort to disinvite him as soon as it was announced that he was the speaker.[1] And then when that failed, activists passed out flyers encouraging students to boo Schmidt during his speech.[2] This all took place before he set foot on campus because of alleged sexual harassment.
This wasn't about what everyone wants it to be about.
Every one of these posts about boos at commencement speeches has one of these comments near the bottom. I feel like I’m failing some pop culture quiz. What does this mean?
Indeed, and while they did the recording for Dark Side of the Moon he miraculously, almost creepily appeared in the studio. They did not recognize him - bald head and all.
I did not know Sid got dozed without consent, but this is not something to do to people. There was knew a girl who was doing it and eventually everyone figured out and started avoiding her like plague.
It's a song by "The Who". Though given the controversy their lead songwriter (Pete Townshend) has been through, I personally would refrain from quoting him on the topic of kids.
As others point out, a song by the band, "The Who". But it's since come to be a phrase to suggest that the upcoming generation (the kids) are going to be okay.
As opposed to the more common refrain of "the kids these days…" (and then append some generational gripe like, "are just weed-smoking, lazy, game-playing, phone-staring, TikTok-headed, etc…"
Other than the TikTok-headed part, the phrase could easily be applied to at least as far back as the 80s (NES) depending on definition of game-playing. Before then, there was foosball and pinball. Nevermind the kids that play card/board games. Also, while not staring at a phone implying smart phone use, it was often said about teens having a phone growing out of the shoulder from them constantly being on the phone with friends.
So, yeah, kids these days...are just like the generations of kids before them.
It's personalized and made by peers vs professional Hollywood productions. Of course, I'm thinking about original MTV and not whatever it evolved into with reality crap programming.
Right, but it still has the same kind of energy as MTV. Music, counterculture (to en extent), and crude humour. It got to the point where when Beavis and Buthead got a reboot, they reacted to tiktoks
AI is largely unpopular outside of the tech & business worlds. Most laypeople see it as falling on a spectrum between unwanted and annoying (google getting worse, AI chatbots proliferating in every app and site) to actively harmful (jobs being replaced by ai).
The fact that comments agreeing with this sentiment get downvoted here isn't a huge surprise, hn is firmly inside the tech/business world.
Most people will experience it as sludge, if they experience it at all. Countries that do not aggressively regulate AI out will see our already profoundly eroded customer service ecosystem disintegrate completely. The already opaque and awful systems that determine things like access to credit or access to healthcare will become even more opaque and inscrutable and produce measurably worse outcomes for actual humans.
This is kinda obvious to most people, who are already experiencing an enormous amount of sludge in their daily life.
Tech-bro optimism in the face of GenAI is so painfully decoupled from lived reality it's frightening. Tech has not made the world a better place for most people over the last fifteen years, and it is poised to make things much, much worse.
For what it's worth, you're probably downvoted way more for the whole "woe is me, I'm always downvoted for being right by people who are wrong" false martyrdom routine. Maybe leave that part off your post next time: it only detracts from the rest of it.
You might also refrain from generalizations like "hn is firmly inside the tech/business world". HN is not a single person, there are a variety of people here with a variety of experiences and opinions and biases.
What's this have to do with the thread you replied to?
And... anyway... Google just changed its homepage to make "AI Mode" / LLM responses the norm. LLM usage is just going to be the norm for the foreseeable future. Doesn't matter if a wary set of "laypeople" are reticent. They're still going to ask Google questions and be affected by it in their digital lives.
Correctly or not (probably to some degree correctly) new grads are hearing AI is a major reason why they're having trouble finding jobs which is simultaneously 1.) Probably mostly has always been the case--I no longer have the vast sheaf of rejection letters when I ever got one at all and 2.) Is anecdotally actually the case for a variety of reasons that also include pandemic overhiring and probably an out-sized AI effect on junior engineers, probably especially programmers.
I think the overhiring sentiment is largely accurate, but not as it’s frequently presented.
It’s not purely over hiring, it’s that many of these companies are doubling down on AI spend(in terms of model creation, hardware investment, etc), and need to allocate their funds differently.
So it’s not AI efficiency causing the layoffs, it’s AI resource allocation.
And the reason they don’t have the funds to invest? Overhiring.
A lot of the companies doing layoffs (META, Microsoft, Amazon) aren’t just using AI coding tools, they’re trying to be the hardware and be the models behind the AI.
And they see the failure to do so as an existential threat.
I think it's more than that. They've heard for most of their lives that college is the way to a good job. Now they're graduating, many of them with debt, and as they do, they're hearing that AI means that the jobs won't be there. And now, at their commencement, someone is talking about AI. One of the people responsible is talking about AI!
That's all fair. Whether or not AI is the/a primary factor in the challenge in getting entry-level/junior roles especially in tech and especially in relation to the milk and honey situation the past decade+, I'm sure a lot of grads struggling to get interviews believe it is. Which makes a commencement speaker associated with Google and AI a rather tone-deaf choice.
this isn't the first instance of society failing to deliver on its promises - I'm almost 40 and still no house. What makes this time different, I think is the question?
did you have a real estate developer come and visit your school and talk about how the surging house prices were really helpful for them
I think this is just it being blatant. it doesn't necessarily mean anything will come of it but of course tensions will be high if you get an ai pitch instead of a congratulation speech
Agreed, AI is a convenient excuse. If we had covid level interest rates these graduates would have a lot easier time finding a job. Companies are downsizing their bets and counting pennies to cash flow to invest in AI infra, which they wouldn't need to do in a low interest environment.
He keeps his Gulfstream fueled and ready to go to Cyprus, where he bought a passport. In Cyprus there is an international "elite" of Western and Russian oligarchs.
I suspect general attitude to AI will split along those who had to apply for jobs in the post-AI world of automatic resume generation and filtering and those who didn't.
Who do you imagine the winners and losers will be? To the extent AI is useful and disruptive, it's best utilized by people with capital. Which is to say, the winners are few and the losers are everybody else. In this case, the losers aren't just more vocal, they're louder and more visible because they're much more numerous.
We're talking about an entire generation being impoverished and powerless, and the response from people like you and Schmidt is a dismissive "winners and losers". If this is the whole plan from AI evangelists be prepared for a heck of a lot more blowback.
If you care about society and this technology reaching its potential I hope you find your way to "yes" on giving a shit about other people.
I’ve been a small business (manufacturing) owner for about 25 years. AI saves me time, extends my reach and reduces my time to market. AI isn’t a threat to me; it’s a daily tool I use. I’m also a former SWE - I took time most of Anthropic’s courses to maximize my ability to leverage the tools. It’s a win/win for me.
I am trying to understand how many of the students are complaining about AI when they themselves may have been using it a great deal. Because that seems hypocritical.
I can be pressured to use it at work to keep up with others who use it, while simultaneously knowing that it is eroding and devaluing my skills, and wishing that we could all stop using it together.
Apart from being tonedeaf, this stuff just strikes me as very lazy. Who still needs to be told that AI is new and transformative? Getting the privilege of monologueing to a crowd of people on one of the biggest days of their lives, and then just throwing out a bunch of obvious cliches... pretty damning imo.
Absolutely, great graduation speeches are unique and from the heart. They don't sound like a sales pitch for the latest trend or thing, and mentioning AI shows how clueless theses speakers are.
I think this is the key point. HN commenters on this thread and related ones like to assume everybody’s an activist luddite but actually I bet the majority of the audience is just rolling their eyes at the amount of open doors being kicked in while being forced to sit still and listen to that drivel.
Which is why they booed the mention of AI specifically, surely.
It's because they're bored of the speech, not because they're angry at the hearing praise for the technology that is poised to fuck up their careers and futures
You can be pissed off about AI without being an "activist luddite" you know
It's not "out of touch" or rubbing everyone's noses in it or any of the other nonsense that people are talking about. It's got a pretty clear thesis: this is a revolutionary technology of a kind that many of us thought impossible even within this last decade; and it hasn't been fully defined what its use and shape will be for humanity; and then there's a note of optimism in it.
As far as I can tell this is a pretty decent commencement speech. It's not "disconnected from reality" or "living in a bubble" or "spiteful" or any of these other phrases that people are using.
A commencement speech has to address the elephant in the room: this present revolution. It has to exhort the students on to something: which this aims to do. And it has to present challenges in order to do so: this does that as well.
It is absolutely disconnected from reality. An old billionaire does not in any way understand what new graduates are feeling and fearing about AI and its impact on the world. He has not existed or lived like any normal person does for decades at this point, and holds significant blame for the current state of tech/AI and everything that comes with it.
"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.
Why would they? It's so trivial to do it yourself, it's easy to imagine what they're concerned about. Things like the optimal number of agents to deploy in their swarm, the best way to use AI to route yacht and private jet movements between your residences, what kind of AI business to start after graduation and how many billions to invest in it.
They aren't out of touch when it comes to the prospect of cutting jobs and how it will pump their stock portfolios. They are drooling so hard the big risk is that they make the axe handle slick and throw the axe instead of slicing the job prospects of those in the audience.
I don't know if you're aware but a big meme at Google from when Eric was CEO was when he was encouraging all googlers to install Nest in "one of your homes"
Their behaviors feel so detached and alien to me. Here are my hypotheses:
- They love AI and are so self-absorbed that they struggle to think of other people's perspectives. They only view it through their own lens and are oblivious to it. So, to them, others' opinions should mirror theirs, which is why it doesn't register for them.
- They know of the impacts their ideas will have, but think that the positives will somehow eventually trickle down to the commoners and the negatives will be minimized or only affect people that 'deserve it'.
- They genuinely despise young people and this is just a socially acceptable way of expressing their hatred - they understand everything.
Which one of the three do you think it is? Or are there other reasons?
It’s just a completely different class + being an exec requires certain personal traits. These two combine to whatever we see nowadays. You can call it detachments or whatever, but to be a successful exec you basically have to be a big asshole and a giant owbua.
Basically they believe whatever they did is righteous in a religious way, and how can you not see it? These types of thoughts.
But it's not that simple. The point I'm making is that their reaction to making money also feels very inhuman.
Suppose your comapny just won a key contract, putting your competitors out of business. Would you go to stand on a stage in front of the other business, gleefully talking about how your victory will upset the industry? How it's a sign of the changing times, but a blessing in disguise because those employees get a chance to move to another career, or practice valuable budgeting and social skills in the line to the food bank?
>Their behaviors feel so detached and alien to me.
Because they are. Extreme wealth is literally a brain disease. It is physically impossible to remain a normal empathetic human being with that level of detachment from reality. Back when things were 10x, or 100x difference, there was still some amount of reality that just couldn't be abstracted away from you having to deal with. But the modern day reality of >1000x disparity has completely removed that, and they are more or less living as demigods to us in comparison.
> Perfect, that's exactly the message of despair we want to send! (How I imagine picking these speakers goes at every college campus)
AI-era commencement speeches should totally be gloating "Ha, ha! I'm going to get immensely rich, and most of you fools are going to end up in the gutter! Sucks to be you [sticks out tongue]! Great for me, me, me! AI. Is. Awesome."
Your comment really drove home for me the lack of empathy and humanity in these speeches, even neglecting the AI stuff. These young people are celebrating a real accomplishment and a life milestone. They’re about to enter a world where their decisions will shape our society. In that context, a speech like this is just gauche.
Absolutely. They have no idea the vitriol my classmates have for them. I really am worried, lot of friends are very casual about their extremism. When anger and disgust is the feeling of the majority: it’s only a matter of time…
i think we should not think they are gullible but they want to make they think they are. they want a message through and the message is that they are creating a threat and they will use it.
For what it's worth, this might not be a recent phenomenon only. My dad has been saying for decades that the speaker at my mom's college graduation (Paul Tsongas, if I'm remembering correctly) was incredibly depressing and basically just said "the world sucks out there, good luck going into it".
That was the gist of mine as well. "There are too many problems and too few people who care. So please care, and don't let the size of the problems keep you from caring."
what do people need to hear? inspiration or truth? Personally I want the cold awful truth. But I think humanity in general thrives on inspiration and delusion.
What people need and should hear depends on the situation. When you visit a dentist, you don't need to hear about how to properly build a house, no matter how truthful it is. You should hear truth about state of your teeth. Or, if you are having a wedding speech, you should not pontificate about how to keep the bathroom clean - even if what you say is cold hard truth.
Second and importantly, it is not like these commencement speakers would be concerned with truth or were trying to convey truth in their speeches. The dilemma here is not "truth versus inspiration/delusion". Schmidt was not selling truth, he was selling his product and was trying to make people believe things that will make him earn more. Schmidt want trying to sell inspiring vision of the world for the students, he effectively put them into a passive-you-dont-matter role in his vision.
College students had 4+ years to learn about the real issues before the graduation ceremory, and the rest of their lives after it. Rubbing every problem in the world in their face at a graduation ceremony is just gauche.
To everything a time and a season. Not every second has to dedicated to "problems".
Totally agree, cut the kids a break and give them a pat on the back and tell them something inspiring! Try to remember what it was like to be in their shoes on that day.
Edit: I don’t mean “kids” in a condescending way, I just mean young people taking the first steps into adulthood and careers.
"Not every second has to dedicated to "problems"." I was a lot quicker to agree with this sentiment in prior decades where we had notionally fewer of them, the big ones seemed better understood, and the folks managing the levers of power at least managed the appearance of competence.
There has never been a commencement speech made when the speaker couldn't have spent the entire time speaking about problems. Ever. Not even one. It has always been possible to spin an hour of doom and gloom about the future, based on 100% real problems.
A commencement speech is not the time or place for that.
I'm not saying it has to be 100% upbeat each time, just that it is not the time or place for an enumeration of problems.
It won't even do any good. What are they supposed to do with this that they weren't already doing? It's not like the world was sunshine and rainbows for all of them up to this point and the commencement speech is the correct time to disabuse them of that notion. This isn't your one chance to reach them with news of doom. It's your one chance to send them off and maybe encourage them to fight the doom. It is appalling to miss out on that opportunity because you've got an axe to grind and don't understand that not every opportunity to grind it is appropriate. Actively depressing and discouraging them is almost certainly achieving the opposite of what even you want to achieve.
Slightly facetiously, but also completely seriously: I thought the speaker was talking about a "solution" that explicitly frames the students as the "problem" - and the students noticed.
Yes, and the audience noticed that his solution was a solution to the problem of "how do I multiply my $40B net worth" and not the problem of "AI blasted the job market how do I pay rent?"
This will go over great at weddings and birthday parties!
We need to fight for a better world, but that requires that we're not burnt out by thinking about our problems 24/7. We need some fun and joy to make the fight worthwhile.
I am a teen, so I want you to consider yourself in the shoes of us youngsters.
you grind for 4 years, you might have student debt or a substantial loss of family income as it was invested in your education (I am assuming 30k$)
Now the whole purpose of it was to educate you, now some people cheated their way through with AI or whatever in the education system.
So the whole thing ends up going to the job market and well the job market isn't doing good.
There are multiple (and I mean multiple) factors for the job market to not do good but its not a overexaggeration that people at the top who have influence might be more prone to AI psychosis (Read mitchell's tweet) and how they are all announcing that AI is the reason why you might not have jobs.
Then, you have these same people come to you on stage and say to integrate AI or use AI and this AI that AI.
What would you as a student do in this? Would you not feel angry, frustrated, would you not disagree and you all don't have a mic and can't cut off that speaker with words.
The only thing that you can do to show disagreement is to boo, it takes one kind soul's immense frustration to boo and then everybody would join, would you also not boo if that was the case, to show your disagreement
To finally have a voice because their boos had voice larger than many things which is why we are discussing it here and people are discussing it!
I just graduated, my friends and I have realized that these older generations are just ladder pullers: they hate us. I’ve watched my classmates politics and outlook become more extreme over time. I don’t think I have any respect for older generations anymore, I was never this jaded before, but my classmates say more extreme stuff.
I'm also a recent graduate and I can confirm everything you've said. Both me and everyone I know in my age and social group are feeling more hopeless and jaded than ever.
What are your classmates saying? Since our class has little to no power, representation or money, I'm very pessimistic about the odds of anything ever changing.
Hey, which college or country are you from? if you aren't comfortable with it publicly, you can send me a mail. Asking because I am curious although I might be 4 years younger than ya (going to a college rather than getting graduated)
I am actually at a bit of cross-roads myself as the degree would cost 30k$ where I live (for context I live in India) and so the competition and job market is so much that I would only recoup the tuition fees in 2 years. There are some other colleges if I just wanted a degree for the sake of it which are cheaper but literally 0 companies come to them and I would have to look for higher studies (masters). I would actually love some suggestions, I have went more in depth at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097377
I am unsure of how much the industry might change 4 years from now, my only idea is to probably learn more about how things work and to have them around my curriculum and get good grades as this time it would be something that I am interested about (I wish to learn compilers, fpga, for some reason I really want to read golang codebases), I don't know how the job market might be when I land but its really messy right now and I am sorry that you are in the crossarm of it all.
I once made a project[0] on how many words a person has written on hackernews and you have written 60k words on hackernews and so have been a very decent member of it and I think that's because of not external factors or goodhart's law where something becomes a measure but rather because you genuinely enjoy doing these things. I completely understand your pessimism as I feel like I might be in the same boat albeit younger but it feels incredibly unfair to me for all the things that are happening in the world.
I think that being part of the community shows a level of curiosity which is atleast worth a interview or to get to know them more about it, I think that all you want is just a way for you to prove yourself and your skills. I urge the more experienced folks who might be looking for an applicant to perhaps show some support to @tavavex and give them an option to explain themselves.
Not sure if an interviewer reads it and you would actually get an interview and more chances to prove yourselves but the job market is so fundamentally broken at the moment with fake jobs and so much weirdness that even seniors sometimes don't find jobs & another part is that as college graduates, we worry about all the money and time spent on it and all we want is a fair chance. So I just hope that my comments atleast tries to nudge it towards that, perhaps I recommend taking part in the who wants to be hired thread within HN too.
Sorry this got long but I understand this struggle in some sense and its hard to explain but I have tried to try to do best in both explaining it and hopefully helping you out and I hope that you find a decent and stable job.
The increased younger vote for Trump is a big part of our current set of problems.
Remember: Google was declared a monopoly by Bidens Justice department. We were setting up a system to break down monopolies and restore order to the market. Trump got rid of that.
The problem was Trump marketed himself as being anti-establishment (like many far-right parties do) and people fell for that crap.
It’s the same problem time and time again. people conflate regulation with “the establishment” when in fact it’s usually strict rules and processes that prevent us slipping into a dystopian nightmare. But of course people make this mistake because the same people who stand to benefit from deregulation are the ones pouring millions of dollars/pounds/or whatever your local currency into convincing people that the issue was caused by someone else and can only be solved by removing those safe guards we needed.
I dont think so. Trump promissed male supremacy and many men liked it. The move toward Trump is in men specifically. If it was about establishement, women would move the same way.
Trump also promissed that it will be ok to mistreat some groups and people who hated one of those groups loved the message - sometimes even when they were members of some of those groups.
But, the young voters moving to Trump was male thing and 100% based on misogyny and male supremacy.
The last batch of kids was blaming their job woes on mexicans, women, and authority figures delivering mild punishments for shouting trans slurs. This batch seems more upset with the billionaires or at least AI. That's a big improvement.
Mmmhmm, and tech workers tended to blame Indians instead of Mexcans, women were less keen on blaming women, the woke percent never went anywhere near 0, and Captain Obvious is a full time job. Observations about the general sentiment of a crowd do not in any way imply uniformity, and it's frankly a bit silly to pretend that they do and then get upset about it.
That statement makes sense for Eric Schmidt but not the random real estate executive. I'm pretty sure they're just taking their anger out at the nearest target
Before GenAI came for their jobs, real estate was more extractive on the younger generation and it wasn't close: the median financed phone is $30/mo while median rent is $1500/mo. We generally find RE less interesting here because it has a scale ceiling and low returns-to-intelligence (compare Elon Musk to Donald Trump) but it's the oldest hustle and it never went away.
Commencement is a time of celebration and accomplishment. The students are well aware of the existence of the problem; that's the exact reason they're booing.
It's like going into your therapist's office and having them trauma-dump on you. Their issues might be entirely legitimate; it's still not the time or place.
> Some of the loudest hostile voices were reserved for Schmidt’s comments on AI, however. “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts you could never accomplish on your own,” comparing it to a “seat on a rocket ship.” He also suggested that the students will be the ones to “shape artificial intelligence,” even if they “don’t care about science… because AI is gonna touch everything else as well.”
The Google CEO claiming he and other tech billionaires gave you a seat on a rocket ship via AI is not "acknowledging a problem". Booing something you consider a problem is a form of acknowledgment though, so I'm not sure how you can conclude that the speaker was the one doing what you suggested and not the audience here. Do you really think "AI is like a ride on a rocket ship" is an acknowledgment of issues rather than a "comfortable narrative"?
> Schmidt, who served in various capacities as CEO, Chairman, and technical advisor to Google and its parent company Alphabet across several decades, ...
AI is hitting junior positions way more than senior ones right now, and students with no professional experience are exactly who that affects most. They're walking into a job market where the kind of role they were supposed to start in is shrinking.
That said, booing a speaker mid-speech wouldn't be my move on my own graduation day. But I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't be grinding my teeth in my seat.
Not necessarily contradictory. If all your peers are using AI, you might feel you have to use it too to avoid falling behind… especially with curved grade thresholds
I wonder how many of those booing used AI to write their term papers. From the teaching side, I hear AI has become an epidemic of students scamming their way into degrees.
I can fully understand some executives trying to hype up AI with the "It'll create more jobs!" mantra, but as it happens, the AI boom coincided with the post-COVID layoffs (from the hiring frenzy we saw back then) - so even though AI might directly not be responsible for less junior/grad hiring in the various industries, the vibe is that it is still responsible for the tough times college grads are facing.
I am starting to see so much consistency in the "it's not AI, it's overhiring" commentary that it's actually starting to feel like a narrative constructed to allay concerns about AI impacts. At this point it's a "pandemic overhire correction" that the industry has been doing for two years, and is accelerating.
Yea, I don't know how long they're planning to milk the "pandemic overhiring" excuse. Ten years? In 2030, we'll still be seeing headlines like "Company X lays off another 10,000 workers due to overhearing ten years ago..."
The over hiring explanation will only last so long - you can't really say we were still over hiring after about 2023, right?
So by next year you'd expect that shedding to be mostly done I think. and then companies no longer hiring juniors to train up will be obviously ai related
Needs more booing. These so-called rich people have the gall to say, “You guys are going homeless, and there is nothing you can do about it. However, please use AI.”
They just have not considered the massive shareholder value being captured, which under capitalism is certainly guaranteed to trickle down, as it had been historically proven time after time.
Most Americans directly own stocks and a college graduate is even more likely to. This isn't the 1860's so a lot of these critiques of capitalism are anachronistic. The reality is "shareholders" are fairly ordinary people and not a tiny and mysterious group of elites.
First, trickle-down economics is a modern neo-liberal concept.
Second, most people just do not earn enough to invest a significant amount of money in stocks. It's a system that largely benefits the rich. The more money you already have, the more you can invest.
AI Bros are spending too much good will being obnoxious about fancy approximation algorithms, when their purpose in real AI will be lizard brain/reflex type actions.
The next AI winter can't happen soon enough. (Note each past AI winter did give us new tools just like this one will, it's just a shame that it'll be an excuse to worsen customer support)
Unfortunately this AI ship has the US economy lashed to its bow, and the moment it begins to founder we're all going to have to hold our breath for a while in the best case. Thought leaders are all out of ideas that don't have AI in them (and even that ideation is probably being delegated to an LLM these days).
Unfortunately, this is typical of the feral business overclass. It seems that the rampant Trump regime, the advent of AI, the long-term decline of the United States, coupled with the complete impunity the business class were granted during the 2008 crisis, has gone to their heads. The hate saddens, but doesn't surprise me.
"Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer."
There's an interesting duality. If you are someone people can target with relentless online harassment, you should be mortally scared to share your honest opinion.
If you are not, like Eric Schmidt's, there's absolutely no reason to care what other think.
By rejecting AI, these students have a particularly bad future ahead. Rejecting reality doesn't make reality bend to you. Due to this rejection, they risk having few jobs, then no jobs. The Schmidts of the world have negative sympathy for such deniers.
They aren't rejecting it at all. They are expressing their opinion on it which is hugely negative. Why? Because it's a useful technology, but so far has succeeded in taking jobs away, poisoning minds, art, and politics, hoovering up all the capital, and getting shoved into every possible thing.
The billionaires tell us over and over, "Get on board or you'll starve!" and I am certain they will be stunned when they meet the rude end of a pitchfork.
Edit: I did not intend to advocate violence, just warn about public opinion. Please do not harm anyone.
> They aren't rejecting it at all. They are expressing their opinion on it which is hugely negative.
It is one and the same.
> I am certain they will be stunned when they meet the rude end of a pitchfork.
Is that a threat? Also, do you understand how the police and government work, and whose side they will take? Even if magically the government were on the side of the luddites, which they won't be, China would then take over the country hurriedly by its embrace of AI. This is why the US military is embracing AI. I don't think you or the graduates have the faintest idea of how aggressively and pervasively China is using AI.
> in taking jobs away
The people should be asking for basic assistance benefits, and the graduates should striving to automate more so that even more people can have these benefits. This is the only answer that could be fully consistent with reality. Doing repetitive dumb work is appropriate for ants, not humans. These graduates want a salary without competitively delivering value, and that's not going to happen.
At the very least, the Chinese government has made its official stance clear—though you could interpret this as a way of saying, “Don’t make me clean up your mess.” Companies will weigh which side entails higher costs and actively explore other avenues, and large corporations won’t dare to act brazenly.
If AI becomes very powerful and poses a high risk of replacing ordinary workers’ jobs, this approach will be more effective. For now, however, the market itself may still be able to handle the situation.
> 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 far. China taking over the country would be a massive improvement, but they're going to do that by prompting, "Chat take over the US"? Unlikely.
> The people should be asking for basic assistance benefits
You have resigned your agency as a free human being. We are just a bunch of humans on earth. If we all decided AI was bad enough we could ban it. The people don't want basic assistance, they want a say in the direction of their lives. At the moment, their lives are being directed by billionaires and those who saw a fancy chatbot and decided to willingly become a serf.
China will be able to offer substantially better value for money for goods and services too, more than they already do. Imagine the cost efficiency of DeepSeek but for robot rentals. Those using manual labor will stand no chance.
I’d be anxious, too, if I were just starting my career. Those kids just invested a lot of time and money in an education, and the payoff looks a lot like a gamble.
But AI is going to help, not hurt in the long run. Technology always makes things better and cheaper in the long run. Poverty diminishes, free time increases, things truly do get better over time. This’ll be a short term bump, but it’ll be a steep one.
Your viewport is too zoomed out. When you zoom in on the march of human progress, you'll find a lot of spikes in the amount of human suffering along the way. As we start to hit the limits of what Earth can sustain, do you really feel confident that the next spike will dissipate quickly?
How short term do you think it'll be, and how confident are you in that?
If it takes until these kids are in their 30s their careers will be pretty affected. "maybe the next generation of kids after you will be fine" isn't super comforting.
If the genAI cheerleaders are correct, and this is a change much like the industrial revolution, then things will be horrible for the average person for multiple generations.
> “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 boos.
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"?
I thought that might be where it was from, but I hadn't seen it and its been so long since I've seen the skit that I forgot where it came from. Thanks :)
Imagine bringing a new technology into the world, telling everyone it’s gonna take everything from them including possibly their literal lives, and then telling a bunch of kids to get on board or they’re gonna miss the billionaire rocket ship! lol these people are so out of touch.
From the same guy who was part of a conspiracy to suppress wages in his industry. He's completely tone deaf. Not that I'm surprised coming from a billionaire tech executive.
I'm not blaming the kids. They are a reflection of society as a whole. It's just a statement of how a significant portion of society have changed their views of tech billionaires over the span of just a few years.
Listen, right now the children are tripping over themselves competing to be worst possible people. They witchhunt on AI, antisemtism is on the rise including all of the stock cannards, they have turned hating things into a fucking performance for clout. I want to be able to like the younger generations but there is no getting around that sometimes the kids really are fucked in the head.
are you proud of being old and not being able to emphasize with the younger generations?
I feel like I see this a lot. oh I'm so old bla bla bla I don't get this oh I have no idea why xyz...
if you're young right now, your future seems to be certainly fucked.
do you think the youth is going to be all upstraight and say "take the bull by its horns!" as they give up any hope of owning a house or having a family?
but I guess they are "fucked in the head". they should be appreciating the S&P500 all time highs on their 401ks... oh right, they're not part of the gravy train. whoopsie
These older dudes are just ladder pullers, they’re always talking down to us. We don’t care anymore. They're shocked by our behavior? They should take their own advice: accept reality, deal with it, this is the future.
Did you expect them to cheer on a billionaire that had a direct hand in fucking up their future? In this case the hate is rational if you ask me, and I’m a late millennial.
Eric Schmidt’s speech was particularly bad regardless of the subject, his condescending tone alone deserved the booing.
Not the only issue people have issues with:
> Ritter filed a lawsuit in November that alleged Schmidt, a former chief executive and chairman of Google, “forcibly raped” her while on a yacht off the coast of Mexico in 2021.
> She also claimed they had sex without her consent during the 2023 Burning Man festival in Nevada.
ref: https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-03-06/former-goo...
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.
Staying with your rapist husband/boyfriend is the norm. He might beg for forgiveness and say he won't do it again. He might say he didn't understand you when you said no. He might threaten to kill you if you open your mouth one more time. He might do all of those in the same five minute span.
Almost every women I am close to has been raped or assaulted.
What part of this do you specifically not understand?
People have different abilities. It’s often hard for people to not understand why something that’s natural to them isn’t natural to others. In some lights, humans are very similar; in other lights they can be wildly different.
I have cut multiple toxic people out of my life, even very close relationships and family, and it was easy as farting for me. It’s alien to me to not be able to do that. However it’s easy to recognize different people have different capacities in this regard.
Sometimes you can't cut people out of your life because your life depends on them.
Do you really think the last sentence was necessary? It's a good answer otherwise.
it's a great last line; when trying to explain something to someone it behooves someone to ask a follow-up so they can clarify anything not yet answered.
A lot of people walk away from physically, mentally, or emotionally abusive relationships. I know many.
Reading the question generously, the person is asking why someone stays instead of leaves. Two of your 3 examples are emotional manipulation (big red flag, run away) and the last one is a threat to your life (big, big red flag, run away).
I think it is reasonable for someone to not understand why a person would choose to stay in that situation.
Of course, life is more nuanced than that, and the rash of pro athletes lately that have been exonerated from these accusations further muddies the waters.
You don't think that the CEO of Google might have some resources at his disposable to manipulate or threaten someone?
They might, but that isn't what they are addressing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battered_woman_syndrome
From the little that I know:
Every abuser in my personal life whom I've learned about--most of whom I'd also met and spent time with before learning of their deeds--are extremely charismatic people who make active efforts to both isolate their partner from their social circle as well as do things externally that increase their reputation amongst both their peers and the peers of their partner. The people who batter, violate, and terrorize their partners are, with unusual frequency (in my experience), the same people who pick up the tab for everyone at the bar, who reliably buy people gifts, and who offer trusted advice and counsel in trying times.
Now, as to why these abusers are like this, that's a more complex thing. I'm not qualified to speak on it, but in the examples I've seen in my life, they're often people who have narcissistic personality disorder, where they're extremely attached to being seen in favorable lights by those around them, and as a result, react viciously to those who challenge that (oft fictitious) image. (This isn't always a conscious process--to put yourself into their shoes, imagine you're inextricably convinced that everyone is trying to defame you, abuse you, and tarnish your reputation at all times (which is probably true for the abuser, because in trying to prevent such fiction, they do monstrous things that fulfill that exact prophecy), so you need to constantly prevent it from happening by becoming trusted and loved by every means necessary, or else.) However, in an effort to maintain this image, they become very well-regarded by those around them, which makes the victim of their abuse sound insane when they try to call them out.
These people also frequently attach high-value people (such as the children they have with the abused) to them so that they are more difficult to harm, hold accountable, or separate from. I have never, ever heard of an abuser who didn't actively maintain an external factor that made them incredibly difficult to prosecute ("but he has kids, and the kids adore him" / "but he donates so much of his time and money to local charities" / "but he's putting X through college", etc). Putting the abused OR people the abused cares about in financial dependence with them (paying for school / rent / resources for them or their lives ones, isolating the abused from avenues to financial independence, etc) is also very common, if the abuser has such resources. Then, the abused trying to get help is made to become someone who's trying to "defame" the abuser, "rob" their loved ones of financial assistance that they depend on, "steal" the children from their father "whom the kids so love". In the abuser's mind, if their being imprisoned means someone is immediately put in harm's way by their absence, they are safe.
The opportunities for the abused to be made to feel completely insane by the world the abuser has created around them are innumerable; the goal of the abuser is to make the victim sound like a monster for trying to challenge the abuser's authority, and usually, by the time the abused catches on to the situation they're now in (during which time the abuser has been nothing but sweet and caring), the abuser has already completed the process, and that world now has extreme consequences if the abused tries to escape it. They're no longer leaving their partner--they're leaving their entire family, their friends, their finances, their entire support network, because the abuser has ingrained themselves into all of it, and done all they can to make their authority unchallengeable (or, at least, convinced the abused of such).
Combine that with the abuser very often making a habit of encouraging the abused to doubt their own judgment, telling them they're stupid or worthless (in words subtle enough that you or I would believe them), or finding people from the get go who already lack such confidence (which the abuser may not even realize is what they're doing--they're just looking for someone who doesn't seem like a threat to them, while simultaneously being incapable of believing that they, themselves, might be that threat, as a result of being blinded by their own narcissism. Which is another factor--how do you convince someone they're being harmful when they're incapable of believing that they have the capacity to harm? The abusers often believe the same lies they tell their victims, and tell them with unwavering conviction.)
Do you have anyone in your life who you hold in very high esteem, whom you are very close to, who you've also heard ill of? When has your gut response been to believe the person speaking ill of them, instead of your trusted, caring, friend, who you've known for years, who would "never do such a thing"? It might be someone so close to you that believing their victim would feel like buying into a conspiracy theory--which is exactly the circumstance that the abuser is trying to maintain.
That's a big part of why.
There is an equally impressive ability of abusers to rewrite history to put themselves in the role of the victim. That comes along with justifying all sorts of behavior. The classic "if you didn't make me so angry I wouldn't hit you" is logic that adds up to them.
If you are curious enough to read a book about this and related questions, Unspeakable Things by Brooke Nevils (who accused Matt Lauer) really opened my eyes on this.
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 questions", but we all get the message you are sending here.
> I know you're "just asking questions", but we all get the message you are sending here.
You seem to be mind-reading and assuming everyone who doesn't already understand things the way you do is acting in bad faith.
Like you, I am not much of a fan of victim-blaming, but you're reading the post in an extremely negative light. The poster literally concludes with "I just don't understand it." A more charitable way to interpret this statement is "please help me understand."
The first part of your response is informative, and I thought "interesting response." The second part is just nasty and I thought "wow, what a **." Do you want the poster to understand or do you just want to score points?
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
Money.
Usually the lawsuits start when the money is more likely to come from that, than from enabling the behavior.
Rape apologia.
81% of women have been sexually harassed, at least 20% have been raped. Yet, weirdly, that hasn't changed the allocation of capital in the United States in their collective favor.
But let's see what kind of person you actually are. Do you have a problem with suing, post-rape? What kind of society would you consider ideal?
Keep in mind that the current criminal case closure rate of rape cases is 25% and has been dropping for the last 10 years.
Uh huh. Or just noting Cash Rules Everything Around Me. Which I doubt was a fact lost on the complaintant - which if the crime occurred, might indeed make the circumstances worse eh?
Which, notably, none of what you are saying even addresses eh?
Do you think Trump has gotten where he is because these things are not happening?
None of this excuses anything.
> Do you think Trump has gotten where he is because these things are not happening?
I don't even understand what you're trying to claim here. As best I can figure out, it sounds like you're saying that Trump made his money from suing people for sexual assault, but that's so absurd I can't even imagine someone trying to claim that as a troll.
Even ignoring that, your argument seems to be "people in general are motivated by money, therefore this specific instance of a person acting where money could plausibly be a motivation is the only possible explanation". It informs quite a bit about how you view the world, but it's not a particularly compelling explanation.
Wow, you are indeed quite confused.
People with a lot of money often get away with things for several reasons, including;
1) people sometimes attack/slander/harass others for arbitrary reasons hoping to get some of it (even if they never have to actually pay them!)
2) ability to hire people to professionally defend them (lawyers, PR people, etc.)
3) their often extensive networks among people in power (often in groups #1 and #2!), which can result in decisions going ‘their way’ even without having to take explicit action - but if they want, allowing them to take explicit action.
4) their ability to absorb extensive financial penalties without actual harm to their style of living, allowing them to be more risk tolerant.
5) they often own things (like newspapers, media outlets, companies), which can make most peoples lives hard if power is applied.
This means most people are hesitant to cross them, as normal folks can likely be crushed. This includes many people like police, public prosecutors, journalists, civil servants, etc. It’s ‘leverage’, and ‘power’.
So for most people, especially if they keep getting what they need, it’s not worth rocking the boat. You’re more likely to just get steamrolled/destroyed if you try. some people will even actively encourage it, as long as it seems like it will pay out. most people caught in this situation will ‘grin and bear it’, hoping to get out ‘alive’ and avoid further contact.
If you’re already being pushed out/fired, you’re already more in the direction of being ‘destroyed’, so the additional consequences of trying to fight are less. And at that point, it’s clear it won’t pay out as much going the other direction.
It’s sex realpolitik + money - and I’m sure anyone in that circle is quite familiar with it. Both the complaintant, and the defendant. Why make a scene if it’s in your financial/safety interest not too, after all? Especially if you’ll likely lose.
If you have not as much to lose, why not make a scene?
If you are a victim of an actual crime or not is a lot less tangential to this calculus than anyone wants to think about, but it’s true.
Notably, a LOT of people will also retroactively cast consensual behavior into non-consensual later, if it is also in their financial or social interest, which further muddies the waters.
After all, were you there when this event potentially happened? Was it rape? Sexual harassment? Was it a half sprung trap?
Good luck knowing for sure if you weren’t, or sometimes even if you were!
> So for most people, especially if they keep getting what they need, it’s not worth rocking the boat. You’re more likely to just get steamrolled/destroyed if you try. some people will even actively encourage it, as long as it seems like it will pay out.
> ...
> Both the complaintant, and the defendant. Why make a scene if it’s in your financial/safety interest not too, after all? Especially if you’ll likely lose.
This is what I'm still stuck on. You're making a strong claim about of what a specific individual's mindset was about a traumatic event based on broad generalizations of social dynamics. It's hard to imagine how you could have such high confidence that someone you've never met has an exact combination of motivation from money and self-preservation to end up acting in ways you'd predict, rather than any number of other plausible explanations.
People make decisions based on many factors.
I’m just giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming she isn’t a fool.
But hey, maybe I’m wrong and money plays no part in this action between a hundred-billionaire and an ex employee.
Seriously, I just skimmed that LA Times article and wondering why isn't HN discussing this claim made by her?
quote: "She further alleged that Schmidt had built a “backdoor” to Google servers with a team of company engineers that allowed him to spy on her and anyone with a Google account."
When you have everything but can’t even keep your hands to yourself. Shameful.
It seems that when you can have anything money could buy, you start to look at the things money can't buy.
Why can't that ever be talent, or wisdom, or passion? So many filthy rich people. Seem to instantly go "hmm, what's some illegal stuff I can do despite so many legal things available to me".
I'm sure all the above happened back in the day too, but: rich people of previous centuries would go to the arts to find meaning. Being part of an orchestra or theatre troupe or artist alley was a peak achievement. Now we just have boring dystopia where rich guys literally build bunkers for the end of days they are personally bringing about. What the hell happend?
It's a common issue. When you got everything you could possibly want in life or have enough money to buy whatever you want... then for quite a lot of people of either gender, the illegal and illicit becomes the next thing to obtain.
For some, it's an increasingly worrisome amount (and type of) drugs, for others, it's women, and for a select few it's children.
> When you got everything you could possibly want in life or have enough money to buy whatever you want... then for quite a lot of people of either gender, the illegal and illicit becomes the next thing to obtain.
But with a society that empowers men more than women, and relative power disparities of all types lending themselves to behavior like this (plenty of people who don't have everything still have enough power to exploit those they have power over). In the abstract, sure, it might not be something inherent to men, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that in practice women are victimized by behavior like this at a system level that men are not.
To any men who are dubious about this, I'd genuinely suggest asking the women who you have close enough relationships with to be comfortable having tough discussions if they'd be willing to tell you about experiences they've had where men have behaved poorly towards them in ways that wouldn't have likely happened to a man in their circumstances; I'm guessing that pretty much all of them will have experienced far more than you'd imagine. As a man, I'm relatively certain I can't recall any instance of ever experiencing the reverse of this though, and that's my point: going out of your way to try to frame this as a gender-neutral issue basically emphasizes theoretical concerns at the expense of the actual distribution of problems that people face in real life. When things are so slanted that in practice almost everyone in one group has experienced it but relatively few from another group has had the same experience, framing it in terms of that is important.
> But with a society that empowers men more than women, and relative power disparities of all types lending themselves to behavior like this (plenty of people who don't have everything still have enough power to exploit those they have power over). In the abstract, sure, it might not be something inherent to men, but it's kind of hard to ignore the fact that in practice women are victimized by behavior like this at a system level that men are not.
A valid and important point, yes. But then there's Ghislaine Maxwell. By all accounts, she is just as guilty as he was, some say even worse because she actively recruited victims for him.
The fact that society gives less women that kind of power reduces the absolute number of women that abuse their power - but the level of depravity they can sink to those that do rise to power is just as bad as men's.
I feel like the existence of victims of women doesn't detract from the overall point I was making, which is that overall the distribution of people who exploit people like this is overwhelmingly tilted towards men being the dominant source. The fact that you can point to specific counterexamples as a distraction from this is exactly what I'm trying to argue against being useful. For any significant source of mistreatment of an oppressed group in history (which I won't bother calling out examples of because they will readily come to mind), there were likely some members of the oppressed group who took part or at least didn't stand up for the others, but equating that with being the overall source of the mistreatment is at best misguided and at worst actively muddying the waters.
So we’re just going to believe her? Why?
Please list all the reasons you don't believe her.
Isn’t the burden of proof on the accuser?
At least the claim of Eric having a secret backdoor to Google servers letting him spy on whoever he wants seems unlikely. If he was spying on her putting spyware on her devices seems much more likely.
There is no proof. She can retroactively at any point say she did not give consent to extract money. She was with him two years after the first time she was “raped”. She’s the only one that has made any such claims about him.
Condescension is one of his core skills. Ask any long time googler
Oh yeah, he’s the one who said glue people are useless
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.
I think it might be because some folks from the older generation have a sense of entitlement...mostly because they often lived through a glorious period that en masse has been beneficial to them...They expected flying cars, etc...So, now, this time they'll get their AI servants...So, its sort of an expectation (for some from this older generation) that the world will keep giving them lots of good (well, good for them!) things in life.
My sincere apologies if my comments are offensive to anyone (of any age group)...but i do agree that I'm seeing way more older people in support of the AI evolution, and many many more younger people fearing it. My age is far closer to the older generation, but lots of times, i'm feeling what i see lots of younger folks feeling: fear.
I think it's much less about generation than about material conditions. It's easier to convince someone that AI is going to be good for their bottom line if they are already retired, or at least have a significant chunk of savings (and therefore investments) and a job higher up the food chain/org chart than a new college grad does. For most working class people, age is a necessary but not sufficient condition to have these things, but there are plenty of older workers who are feeling the fear as well.
Yeah, i agree that there might be older folks also fearing AI - i'm one of them! :-)
As to your point about likely being more due to material conditions rather than age, perhaps you're right....but, then again, on average I'd say the older generation tends to have better material conditions/positions, tends to have at least some savings (maybe retirement, or at least will have more solvent social security, etc.?)...than say young folks who started graduating college from around the great recession to about now? So, maybe we're both right???
Yeah, I didn't mean to be argumentative, but I hate that issues like this are frequently framed as generational conflicts when they're really class conflicts. There are a lot of people that benefit from erasing the whole concept of class conflict from the public consciousness (though there are many many more that would benefit from the opposite!).
>and fervently pushed by people over 55.
Source? I think you're conflating "pushed by CEOs" (which might lean on the older side) with "pushed by people over 55".
The article we're commenting on lists several examples of the dynamic and it aligns with my personal experience offline and online. There are also stats like these:
https://on.substack.com/p/the-substack-ai-report
"Publishers 45 and over were more likely to use AI than those under 45."
I can, of course, dig up more supporting data, but that is not as important to me as making sense of what I'm actually seeing.
https://www.pewresearch.org/science/2025/09/17/views-of-ais-...
"Younger Americans are generally more likely than older Americans to think the increased use of AI will worsen human abilities."
>"Publishers 45 and over were more likely to use AI than those under 45."
There's probably some skew here where old people in general aren't typically on substack, and therefore of the old people who are on substack, they're more "on the cutting edge" than younger publishers, which don't have such skew.
>"Younger Americans are generally more likely than older Americans to think the increased use of AI will worsen human abilities."
Right but what about actual usage? Young believe social media is bad for them, but nonetheless use it.
I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.
Every time there is push back from younger posters followed by a bit of a generational faceoff.
I think boomers are still inclined to see technology as exciting space-race stuff. As a millennial I remember when the Internet was good but that also feels like a distant memory.
For younger people technology has been dark patterns and skinner boxes and increasingly imposed on them against their will from COVID tela-learning to AI mandates.
>I dunno I'm on some forums with normal older people and they're much more likely to post AI content from YouTube or paste "I asked AI" quotes from chatgpt or even post their own "prompted GAI illustrations" as one guy put it.
No, old people just don't bother hiding it, even though they use it less.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2025/06/25/34-of-us-...
That's a chart for "ever used", not "amount of use".
CEOs are hired by boards. Boards are hired by shareholders. Most publicly-traded American companies have their shares held by pension and retirement funds. Pension and retirement funds exist to send money to people over 55.
I'm sure VPs are sweating bullets over the instructions they will receive during the part of the shareholder's call where mutual fund managers dial their members and hold the phones up to each other.
I know you're trying to reduce it to absurdity, but there's still pressure to make their members happy. The fund managers are under the same competitive pressure as anyone else and are incentivized to get the best possible returns for their clients. If they don't, the members leave and take their money to another fund that is better at making money.
By that definition anything that happens in politics or corporate america is "fervently pushed by people over 55", because that's the group with the most political and economic power. AI push? Boomers. Datacenter backlash? Boomers. ESG push? Boomers. ESG backlash? Boomers.
I know that there's backlash and push on each issue from every age range, but people ultimately vote with their wallets. They're sending their money to people who get them the most money regardless of what they think on an issue.
Yes, as an oldster I’m constantly on the phone with mutual fund managers expressing my desire for CEOs to push more AI. :eyeroll:
Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to get back to conspiring with my fellow seniors to keep house prices up in my local area.
I know you're trying to reduce it to absurdity, but that's not what I'm saying you're doing, and I think you know it.
I'm saying people chase returns. If you find out that one mutual fund is going to give you reasonably higher returns than your current mutual fund, you're likely to at least consider the option of switching to that competing mutual fund, regardless of how they get the increased returns.
Multiply that times a few dozen million people and you start to see some effects on the economy, like laying off workers in favor of using AI.
I'm saying people chase returns.
And I’m saying that there’s so many dots to connect to reach your conclusion that it becomes no conclusion at all, let alone having much to do with the decision-making of oldsters.
It's almost as if this is a complex system of human behavior and incentives that spans an entire society. That being said, if you pay attention to what's going on, it's fairly obvious to see.
Gens Y and Z make up the largest population cohort in the US by size, but hold only 10.5% of total wealth in the US. Baby Boomers hold about half. [0]
Baby Boomers are of retirement age. That means that many of them are drawing off of retirement accounts. Since you can't save for retirement without compensating for inflation, you have to find ways to grow the money. Most people do this through investments backed by stocks and bonds.
Stocks and bonds derive their value from the labor of the people working at the organizations that issued the stocks and bonds. More and more, those people aren't Baby Boomers. They're retired.
So that money is coming from people who are still working: Gens X, Y, and Z.
To increase returns on those stocks and bonds, you have to reduce the amount of money going to the people doing the work so that they can go to shareholders. Those shareholders are often people with retirement accounts.
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/americas-wealth-distriution...
Folks of retirement age or nearing it are largely free to either play with it or not depending on their interest. This segment may present as largely positive if those without interest get to just opt out.
For folks in the middle of their career or earlier, or just starting out, it's more of a labor vs capital thing where capital doesn't care if skills that have been invested in are devalued, and raises expectations where skills are amplified. This segment will likely present as largely negative.
Younger still, high school and earlier, probably fairly free again to play with it or not depending on interest, but subject to temptation to use it to cheat, and subject to teacher influence not to.
> fervently pushed by people over 55.
It is?
I know very few people in that age group who are excited by this stuff.
It's really quite simple. AI is threatening to take their jobs. Everyone gets defensive when their livelihood is on the line.
Most technologies offer new opportunities to young adults.
Schmidt's speech to students goes:
> The future does not simply arrive. It gets built in laboratories, in dormitories, in startups, in classrooms, in legislators, and the people building it will be you and people like you.
This prompts you to say:
> 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.
This doesn't seem like an accurate read on what the Eric Schmidts of the world think.
Here is a quote that is far more representative of his overall message:
“When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.”
Oh don't you know? The young people don't know how to use technology any more. They've never had computers they control. The new hires and the nearly retired have the same computer skils.
Locked down OS iPad kids don't know how to use computers because the manufactures and their parents wouldn't let them.
The Matrix' 1999 "peak of human civilization" wasn't wrong, the world is moving to a society built by a small number of wizards owned by billionaires.
It’s also the one tech that has been picked up by porn but not video games.
I’m kinda surprised by that. Gaming and porn were the ones that spearheaded tech uptake.
This is pretty wrong. There are a lot of people who _hate it_, but it is still a minority. And older people dislike it more than younger people.
https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2026/2/27/public-opinio...
Feelings on it are quite mixed, but people who hate it and boosters are both incredibly loud about it.
> AI optimism is rising, but so is anxiety.
> Globally, the share of respondents who say AI products and services offer more benefits than drawbacks rose from 55% in 2024 to 59% in 2025, even as the share saying these products make them nervous increased to 52%.
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 Schmidt were hired by boards, who were elected by shareholders, with the hope that they'd increase returns. The biggest shareholders in most American companies are pension and retirement funds, followed by funds that are not necessarily retirement funds but are often used by individuals to back IRAs and 401(k)s.
When the executives of Schmidt's generation were hired, they were incentivized with stock options instead of cash. Their compensation was directly tied to how much money was returned to shareholders.
When you maximize a return to a shareholder, you do that by minimizing the costs of the inputs to the business. One of those costs is labor. Payroll, benefits, the costs of the office space people work in, etc.
GenAI offers shareholders - which can be seen as synonymous with people who are approaching retirement or who are retirees - a promise of massively reducing labor costs. In the minds of a lot of institutional investors, they could have companies where the same amount of value is created with only c-suite and executive-level employees working with teams of AI agents that, over time, will become cheaper and cheaper. What was once hundreds or thousands of employees is now a few dozen.
Now, where does this leave young and middle-aged people? In a place where they have a wildly uncertain future. But that's not the retiree's problem. They want the villa on the golf course in Florida, and by the time you have real social problems resulting from a population with no hope for the future, the retirees will be dead or too old to care.
Schmidt's cohort, for their part, have enough money to deal with those problems in the near to mid-term. Or, at least, they think they do.
EDIT:
Love getting downvoted for what is, essentially, a factual statement.
Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for.
“Factual statement“, that’s hilarious. Nothing wrong with an op-ed, but with an opening like that you might want to step back and re-examine those “facts”.
OP wrote it poorly, but isn't wrong. Most retires get income from a few places: Social Security, 401K, or rental property.
Social security is a direct transfer of money from people currently working to people no longer working. The amount you get is vaguely based on how much you earned when you worked, but it's not like the money you paid in went into a savings account for you. It went to the people who were already retired. Remember, the first recipients of SS never paid in anything. It's been a long chain of working paying non-working ever since.
401k's are usually based on stocks. The value of stocks is based on the labor of the people who work at the company. The dividends and interest come from that labor too. Once again, at one point you were that labor, but your labor was going to retired people, and now it's "your turn".
And rental income comes from people giving you the money they get from their labor. You used your labor to buy the house, but the current money comes from their labor.
Now the rest of what they are saying is flawed because two of those three would go away if AI replaced all labor. But they are correct in saying that your cashflow in retirement comes from other people's labor, just as your labor went to other people when you were working.
It's exactly factual.
Let's say you take 10% of each paycheck, withdraw it as cash, and put it in a safe in my basement from my first paycheck to my last one 40 years later. The safe is a safe. It earns no interest. No one else contributes to the monetary value of the contents of the safe in any way.
The 40 years are up. You need to pay for groceries. You go down to my basement and behold the fruits of four decades of toil. You take some of it to the grocery store... and it takes up a far, far larger percentage of your cash pile than you thought it would.
Inflation got you. In fact, if we're talking about 40 years ending this last April, it shaved 66.6% off of the purchasing power of the money in that safe.
Uh oh.
So how do you deal with inflation? Instead of putting your money in a safe, you put it in a retirement account. That retirement account creates wealth for you by investing your money into equities, bonds, and other assets.
Equities and bonds typically grow in value by backing the asset with the surplus value generated by the labor of the people who are doing work for the entity that issued the equity or the bond.
Could you also invest in assets that don't get their returns off of other people's labor? Of course, but most retirement accounts in the US today do not do this.
So, yes, you're living off of money that you did not labor for, at least after you exhaust the inflation-adjusted value of the principal you put up for your retirement savings.
> Retirement, by definition, requires living off of money that you did not labor for
So like you just get handed money to retire without ever working a day in your life? Please tell how this works I want some of that.
You do once you exhaust the value of the retirement account that matches the principal that you invested into it.
If money from investments made with earned money isn't also earned money then no money is earned money.
Of course it's earned money, it's just that someone else earned it.
Increasingly those someones are people who have a lower standard of living than their parents' generation did.
That tends to rot those someones' faith in the future, which is a good way to bring about undesirable changes in a society.
Your argument is a bit flawed though. Most retires get income from a few places: Social Security, 401K, or rental property.
401k's will do great with AI replacing all labor. But social security will disappear and so will rental income, because no one will be able to afford housing anymore.
Most 401(k)s are backed by stocks and bonds. At least in the short term, yes, they'll do great as labor costs shrink in relation to the money earned by selling goods and services. However, if you have fewer and fewer people able to consume because they no longer have income, well, then you have the same problem as you do with housing and social security.
People say that universal basic income is a fix, but let's be honest: employers don't pay people more than they absolutely have to right now, and that's with most of the value earned for the employers being provided by people doing actual work for them. What makes anyone think they'll gladly cough up for those who don't work for them, especially at an amount that will allow most people's standard of living to either remain steady or improve?
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.
> 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.
Since inflation was a thing, so since ever.
If you take the money you labored for and put it in an account without accruing any sort of interest, you will have exactly what you earned to live off of without working.
Since that happens over a span of decades - let's say forty years - that needs to account for the reduction in value brought about by inflation. You offset that using interest generated by loans issued by the institution that operates the account (which is not you laboring) or by returns from owning equities (which is the output of other people's labor).
I suppose the gold bars you mention could rise in value enough to offset inflation without resorting to taking a slice of someone else's economic output, but that's not how most retirement accounts are backed.
> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.
We also have the problem that a lot of people at the beginning and middle of their lives don't have the standard of living that their parents had despite doing all of the "right" things.
> In the US we have a problem that a lot of seniors can't afford to retire.
Gen Z and majority of millennials are completely unsympathetic to this problem.
From their perspective, older generations have actively hindered their careers and financial opportunities to the point where they know they'll have to work their entire lives. They also know the US is marching towards financial calamity when Medicare becomes insolvent in the early 2030s, and don't anticipate Medicare or Social Security to exist when they're older.
Elaborating on this viewpoint: those seniors also had their chance to save for retirement in the cushiest and most prosperous economy of all time. If they didn't choose to do that because they wanted to party or "find themselves", that's on them, and they still got to live it up for cheap while simultaneously removing the ability of future generations to do the same. No millennial or gen Z is going to care that they didn't bother to save a few bucks in a time when houses and college cost as much as a McChicken.
Obviously there are exceptions, but that's the general perception.
This is not even close to the reality on the ground. But America’s enemies would be smacking their lips and rubbing their hands together imagining a regressive youth.
My own conspiracy theory is that AI, and the increasingly authoritarian government swings, are the Boomer generation's last shot at freezing the world in time and ensuring our world is shaped to their vision long after they're all gone. The thing that generation fears the most is that we're all going to just move on from them when they're dead, and finally progress past this "1970-2020" economic/cultural stasis that we've been stuck in for basically my entire life.
kind of wild that you think there has been no shift in culture between 1970 and 2020
A lot of the cultural changes that were achieved are actively being fought against and are slowly being reversed. Seems like every few weeks there is something from the civil rights era being chipped away at.
I grew up in the 90s in Europe. Back then Europe had strong consumer protection, pretty strong worker protection, low entry jobs still payed a bunch, cheap housing (my single parent mom was able to buy a flat while working at a gas station at the age of 23).
Today’s Europe is nothing but austerity, there is no consumer protection left, they’ve split the society by having “jobs that only immigrants want” (i.e. insultingly low paying jobs), nobody can buy a flat anymore unless they’re a 10 year senior at a tech company.
Today’s Europe is exactly the kind of world I always imagine the 1970s to be like. The only exception is in the 1970s Europe had a strong communist or socialist opposition which actively fought for a better world with strikes every week (or at least that is how I read European history).
I think you stated better what i was trying to babble in another comment here. :-)
And you might think it is a conspiracy theory...but the sentiment i'm seeing (obviously a limited data set to only folks i engage with) seems to align so much to it...that if not fully true, *feels* quite close to it - even if not an intentional thing.
+1
> Tennessee State University suggested AI was "rewriting production as we sit here" and told his audience to "deal with it" as they jeered him in response.
Guess it doesn't take much to see what's under the mask.
For folks that didn't read the article, it seems he was talking about music production.
Yeah, people in art production are far far more negative about AI than most sceptical developers.
I wouldn't be surprised if a huge percentage of concept artists are out of jobs or changing specialization these days (Creating a throwaway image for a pitch or imaging document can probably be as easily conveyed through a prompt and the people looking at them are probably often not savvy enough to appreciate the difference).
Where the music industry goes will be interesting, knowledgeable musicians are way too into fiddling/toying to feel any need for AI tools, but since music is pretty much an industry these days fed by promotion, it isn't far fetched that bedroom "AI" artists can leapfrog established ones.. the question is if it'll stick if they can't reach the pinnacles (megahits is part of it, but concerts still seem to matter quite a bit, and an AI won't help you perform even if Milli Vanilli might disagree).
As one who isn't a musician but loves listening to music, the emergence of passable genAI-generated music means that I can't trust new music anymore.
The only new music I'm willing to buy is music that I've seen the artists perform live, or is from established artists that I know and trust are keeping it human.
I have no idea how rare or common my perspective on this is, but it's not impossible that the music industry may see a decline as a result.
I dont get this. Youre so morally opposed to AI music that youre afraid of listening to new stuff in fear of accidentally liking something made with/by AI?
For people who see art as human expression, AI generated music/literature/art is offensive. If they can't trust the artwork to be produced by a human being, they risk being betrayed.
Maybe it's a silly analogy, but you wouldn't buy unlabelled eggs in a supermarket if you are against cage farming because you don't want to accidentally support it.
"jazz is music; swing is business" - Duke Ellington
So the music industry could go hard into AI or whatever the business folks deem appropriate, with various consequences, while the musicians will continue to music and who knows maybe the rent will be covered.
The most jarring thing for me is that artists tend to be the most "communally oriented, socially forward" group of people. I've definitely spent my fair time around them.
As soon as tools came about that socialized their skill, opened it to everyone, they immediately and violently opposed it. Which is totally understandable, except when your core ideology you have been pushing for your whole life is to socialize everything.
The hypocrisy is so suffocating that it was like a 9.0 earthquake in my moral landscape.
And yes, before you come at my throat, free local image generation tools get no hatred exemption.
Nothing was preventing anyone with internet access or a computer from learning to create art before.
“Why bother making art when the slopbox can just extrude some art for you?”
Gee, I wonder why artists have such negative reactions to this technology. I’m actually baffled by your comment to the point where I have to wonder if you’re posting in good faith.
Being community oriented is easy when it basically means recruiting new customers (ie listeners). And though some of those become competitors (ie learn to play an instrument) the process is long and slow and arduous and so very few actually follow through.
But anybody can buy a Suno subscription in no time at all.
Some say that the only "real" string music comes from a Stradivarius, because the Chinese violins have no master craftsmanship with centuries of legacy behind them.
I'd say gatekeeping "real" behind faux barriers is regressive, but a lot of "progressives" seem to disagree...
that must be a good message:
- you all like music enough to go to a four year program and spend lots of money to study it.
- you all probably have been creating music since you were a child and really love it.
- well....
- people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.
- we now have a magic button that can make content by ripping off every previous artist we've trained our models on.
- now that everyone has access to this magic button, music has become even more worthless and the only people that'll make money from it are the people running the streaming services like spotify.
- if you do happen to create some original content, we'll just suck it into our giant copy machine and use it to out you you.
- good luck, have fun, and make sure to pay those student loans back.
> - people don't actually like music like you, and just want content; non-stop content.
This is the big thing that artists are going through right now.
They're realizing that most consumers of art don't care about the process or the artist. They just want music as background noise, or an aesthetically pleasing picture on their wall.
I wanted to listen to heavy metal songs about office life. I'm not going to spend years learning how to play guitar in order to record it, not to mention that I have a voice fit for old school silent movies. I'm certainly not going to spend money on commissioning a song. But 5 minutes in ChatGPT to write and refine some lyrics, followed by 15 minutes in Suno playing with various prompts, and eventually I got "Per My Last Email"[0], and I was happy.
Let the musicians rage against my shortcut. I don't care. Let them rage against some notion of "quality" and how AI doesn't provide it. Don't care, it's good enough for me.
[0] https://youtu.be/ZVia46yAoMU
As long as it's for personal use you don't publish it on a streaming platform or try to make money off of it, there is no problem as far as I'm concerned.
The issue is really the people who fill the streaming platforms with slop to make a quick buck, drowning out the real artists and producers in the process. (As if the Spotify model wasn't already bad enough for artists...)
The think your last sentence hits the nail on the head: it's good enough for YOU. You've essentially made a novelty song, and I don't believe you're going to be listening to it for years.
The problem is when people spend 20 minutes prompting up a song and then attempt to make a career out of slop, and in the process drown out all the new creative works that aren't just remixed slop.
> You've essentially made a novelty song
Disagree. Gp didn't make anything.
I told a waiter in a restaurant what I wanted to eat, and I got it. But I did not make the food : )
Maybe more like collaborated with a robo chef to make a plate of food based on a recipe you've adapted.
At some point you have to be OK with accepting "I made this" as meaning "my vision was executed under my supervision".
> At some point you have to be OK with accepting "I made this" as meaning "my vision was executed under my supervision".
No one has to be ok with this.
Do you argue with a film director when they talk about having made a movie? Do you argue with a founder when they talk about having built a product?
No, I don't have to be okay with that.
It's like oneshotting an app with Lovable or cc and bragging about what "I made"
> Disagree. Gp didn't make anything.
As the GP, I actually agree. I will never claim to have written the song, and I generally try to avoid claiming I "made" the song unless I include the "with Suno" caveat. I prefer to say that I "generated" the song.
> I told a waiter in a restaurant what I wanted to eat, and I got it. But I did not make the food : )
Then can we also stop giving credit to CEOs for the products their company makes? Elon Musk doesn't make EVs or rocket ships.
> Then can we also stop giving credit to CEOs for the products their company makes?
Absolutely! CEOs does many and difficult things, but they don't build anything
> and I don't believe you're going to be listening to it for years.
Well...it's a year and a half old and I still listen to it on a regular basis.
> and in the process drown out all the new creative works that aren't just remixed slop.
It might be shocking to you, but maybe people actually like "remixed slop".
Lots of people eat McDonald's but that doesn't mean it's good for you and will support your nutritional goals, or even that it's good food which tastes good.
If you want to listen to nothing but slop I can't stop you.
Music was already worthless. Here's Deadmau5 giving advice to aspiring producers in 2012:
> You need to make a world. So you have a rollercoaster in your backyard. And it’ll be the hot thing in the neighborhood for about a week. But once everyone’s had a go… they’ll lose interest, go home n play Sega instead. What you need then, is a fuckin’ theme park… and you AND your music are the theme. People come into your theme park…..check out all this shit… buncha rides, no 2 the same, some merch here and there, special events, dolphins through hoops and all that whack shit. You want people to come to your theme park and feel like they’re a part of this world of yours.
Franz Lizst was a rockstar in 1840 because he could write and play the piano really well. But culture and technology has progressed.
A popstar today can usually sing, dance, write, produce, act. They're business people with a marketing vision and gimmicks to go with it. Polymath performers, creators, and multi-instrumentalists. Technology marches forward and the next generation of artists will be those who adapt the tools available.
We're certainly losing something culturally. Just like this guy[1], who spent 1906 lamenting that the mechanical music machine (phonograph) will ruin music, was somewhat right in his prediction that fewer and fewer people would learn instruments and sing well.
"Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? ... When a mother can turn on the phonograph with the same ease that she applies to the electric light, will she croon her baby to slumber with sweet lullabys, or will the infant be put to sleep by machinery? Children are naturally imitative, and if, in their infancy, they hear only phonographs, will they not sing, if they sing at all, in imitation and finally become simply human phonographs -- without soul or expression?"
When I was a really young kid, I used to hum to myself with a buzzing sound to try and copy the early EDM sounds I grew up listening to. I went on to do electronic music production myself. (And that love of electronic music was the fuel that kept me interested in learning classical piano, jazz, music history and more, and why I still have a piano next to my desk now).
Personally, I'm excited to see what the next generation art and artists end up looking like.
[1] https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/21m-380-music-and-technology-con...
> Just like this guy[1],
For the readers who are not aware: John Philip Sousa is, of course, not just some random guy, but the most famous composer of US-American marching music ("The Stars and Stripes Forever", "Washington Post March", etc.) I didn't know that he wrote essays for magazines.
This is really a fascinating document of a bygone era! Thanks for sharing!
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 wealth gap in the population, possible a war, the country is tearing apart... But why so anti AI specifically?
> But why so anti AI specfically?
Because society is structured so that every time some labor-saving innovation comes along, it's used as a tool to drive down wages and reduce workers' bargaining power. And they leaders of these industries aren't exactly hiding it.
You might be able to game it in the short term, but It's not like anyone is seriously thinking this will reduce the totality of our efforts in the long term. Employers are already champing at the bit to reduce headcount and increase output targets.
The only hope these people have to offer in their bleak future is that if you play your cards right, you might be one of the few crabs to climb over the other crabs and escape the bucket before it's dumped into the kettle. It's giving "we need one person from each department to stay on and train the India team after the layoffs" vibes.
Yep. In theory, labor saving innovation (or handing jobs off overseas) should be a joyous occasional all. It could be a joyous occasion for all. But we have structured it so that, the moment it happens, 200% of the benefits go to capital and -100% go to labor -- and the consolation prize for labor is that maybe some of the 200% will trickle down into a different job later, or willingness to spend on overpriced haircuts, or something.
There's an argument to be made that this is a necessary component of an economy that can reinvent itself. Maybe. But even if we accept this convenient and self-serving and suspicious premise, there can then be no concession on the point that structuring it this way creates an obligation on the part of the person receiving 200% to "spread it around" and that attempts to dodge this obligation are morally repugnant, socially unacceptable, and ought to be met with harsh political backpressure.
For the last while, that hasn't been the thinking. Instead we have gone for "blame mexicans and let's see if we can't make it 300%!" The response of the kids gives me hope that people might be coming back to their senses on the matter.
There's an argument to be made that this is just part of a repeating cycle of history. Powerful people have always, will always, and are currently using their power to make themselves more powerful - no matter whether the power takes the form of nobility titles, currency, or company directorships. History consists of a continuous gradual increase in "top 1% wealth" punctuated by sharp decreases.
I agree, this is a reason to boo the (tech) elites. But they seem to boo genAI specifically, right? I'd understand it if they'd just started booing right from the first word.
Somehow, wages tend to go up, though:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES1252881600Q
Nice try, now use a deflator that doesn't systematically understate housing and forced substitution.
A national average (which is what an inflation rate is) can only do so much. It's going to include people who spend very different amounts on housing, probably not much like the situation where you live.
No, the "averages smear out details" problem is completely separate to the core accusation I made and much less interesting. My accusation -- which you completely failed to address -- is that CPI systematically fails to account for forced substitution, introducing a systematic downwards bias that forces "real" incomes to rise over the long term as a direct result of the solvency constraint on individuals rather than improved access to goods and services in the economy.
I'm not sure what you mean by forced substitution.
Rent goes up more than pay. Solvency = the belt must tighten. You decide to eat chicken instead of beef because it isn't inflating as fast and it's good enough. The basket adjusts to model your "preference change." Inflation went down! Your real income went up! Wow amazing!
In the short term, basket adjustments are lagged and modest in impact, but in the long term they are everything. CPI is a good model of consumer price inflation vs last year but a terrible model when compounded. This is before going down the chained CPI and hedonic adjustment tangents, which both reliably adjust CPI in the wrong direction. Funny how all the dubious methodology points in one direction, that of understating inflation.
Worse, the very focus on consumer prices itself is highly misleading. Assets and liabilities matter in an economy that has a middle class and isn't just hand-to-mouth serfs. When assets inflate and paychecks don't and the response is dissaving and debt, that's a problem too. The American Dream isn't to Owner's Imputed Rent a house.
Innovation can make specific skills obsolete; but only if the output of the process actually gets cheaper or better...
It results in the output becoming available to people at a lower price point.
It's not some artificial social system like unions guilds or cartels, it's a tangible thing that actually produces more output with less (or different) workers.
If the tech CEO dream that they are selling that LLMs replace all white collar work within a few years who is going to have money to buy anything at the lower price point?
Anyone who can still find any way to exchange their time for currency...
Unless you believe that we are actually close to making humans generally obsolete.
>so you can all have the exact job you trained for
Couldn't be any more ironic than being delivered at a graduation ceremony. An equal message could be:
"You know all that time, effort and money you just spent learning something over the last few years? It's useless now. Lamo. Congrats on wasting your life."
>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 their lives learning is going to have little to no value to employers. It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
It's like you just spent 4 years learning to sequence with gels, and now someone is telling you that was a waste of time, and you should just stop complaining and deal with it.
> It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
this. I don't understand why people here are pretending like its not a big deal.
But aren't we all going through this? I'm going through it, sadly I'm lacking the plasticity of a young mind!
I know I'm being privileged, but not by much, I'm self employed and the world is changing like crazy and it scares me as well, how will I gather my income in a year (luckily I do live in a "socialist" country, but not so socialist for entrepreneurs)? No idea, but I set up Open Claw and Claude Code and it's opening my eyes to different ways of doing things. The primitives to do this are the same as always (Linux). Sure, if you're doing medicine you won't know how to do this, but you never did, you relied on people like me/us.
Well, perhaps the only difference between me and the younglings is that over time I've come to trust my intellect. I'll deal with it, as they say.
Btw, if you're really suggesting that "this time it's different" (as in AI is different from electricity, the internet, ubiquitous computing), then you agree with the elites: you're going to have to deal with it, the genie is out of the box and it happened faster than ever.
I'll add again, they the younglings have many reason to boo the tech elites, and I'd join them if I were there, I'm just trying to understand what is exactly going on in the minds of our precious new generation, this is important (Hey, I watched Altered Carbon!).
I think it's simply the fact that there hasn't even been an opportunity for the youth to start, it's just misery right from the start. there's no "it'll get better" in that frame of mind
and I'm in a similar situation, although I'm younger
and I do think in a way this time is different, because AI by nature is very "generic", its not just one domain, rather everything is affected
plus there is a kind of mindset that the youth is entitled and that thank God we don't have to hire them anymore etc etc. it doesn't help.
and even though I believe things will get better, the question is "when" and if there will be a new "lost generation" or whatever.
maybe that makes sense? on one hand I'm able to do way more, but I also know what that means at least in the short term. I don't know where the demand will be to meet this new exponential supply.
You're right. Ali Alkhatib believes that AI is a political project intended to shift power and agency away from individuals and organizations and toward centralized power structures. Now, ordinary people must figure out a way forward, because they have fewer and fewer cards to play.
> 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.
So, if a slave owner who owns a plantation and has a bunch of enslaved workers gets a new fertilizer that increases production per acre by 200%, that is good for the slaves?
Production is only good for me if I get to consume it.
To your edit, it's because the commencement speakers are praising AI and probably not praising the Iran war, the wealth gap, or high housing prices. I would imagine if a commencement speaker did praise those things they would get boo-ed too.
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 to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.
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.
Because the manager/owner/techbro class has decided we don't need employees for anything anymore, AI can do it all. This is phenomenally untrue, but that doesn't help you pay off your $400K of student loans or buy a house.
If I hear that "AI is just a tool" nonsense one more time...
Ok, so what is it then?
To me it's a tool. It helps me accomplish my goals with less effort. That's the definition of a tool right? What is AI to you then? Perhaps I'm being dumb, but not sarcastic.
A large crop harvester is a tool, but if you used to work on a farm by hand it's not a tool you're going to get to use. It's a replacement for your labour and value, right? someone else will get to use the tool and earn money.
So the question is in what way ai is a tool to these kids.
Let's add to this comparison a bit.
Said farm workers have also been noticing headlines over the last years like:
"Crop harvester CEO predicts crop harvesting machine will wipe out millions of jobs within months"
"Crop harvester CEO: 'the crop harvester could destroy the world economy'."
"Farm lays off half its employees, pivots to crop harvester" (repeat this one about 10 times a week for months)
Then some idiot walks up to a crowd of farm hands talking about how awesome the crop harvester is.
No shit he's going to get booed lmao. He's fucking lucky they're not beating his ass into a shallow grave.
The harvester is super expensive, using an LLM is not.
Who’s to say AI is not a democratizing force? Like the Internet? And book printing before that? Suddenly we all have a Personal Assistant, suddenly we can all build tools to make the computer do what we want.
Hey where is Stephen Fry with his podcasts when you need him!
With what jobs do you expect them to pay for the Codex Max subscription to use to build their toy software?
The direct and unambiguous purpose of AI as a tool has been to replace labor and treat workers badly. This is not some doomsaying thing. This is literally what CEOs and billionares creating and pushing this shit have openly discussed and shared with reporters (who proceed to publish the quotes 100% uncritically and with no investigative sense of curiosity to ask further questions about it). They are excited at the idea that AI means they can cull millions and millions of jobs.
They can’t be so stupid to think that there is anyone left to extract value form when that happens.
Either we find something better to do than work for -or glue our eyeballs to the products off- our tech overlords or they go down with us. (I used that dash myself thank you).
So, the people who are saying "it's just a tool" are trying to imply that it's just like an electric drill vs a hand drill, and all that will happen is that people will switch to the better tool and get much more productive and that's it!
Any maybe that's where we are today, but AI is rapidly improving and while we don't know what's going to happen there's very clearly a real possibility that instead of just people doing the same jobs but with a better tool, that tool will actually completely replace their jobs. Maybe a significant fraction of the jobs in society. That's no mere tool.
If I use AI to automate swathes of your field out of a job AI isn't the only tool.
Ok I get that. But what is the remedy? Other than to suck it up and make money using our unique human abilities?
Or ok, perhaps laws are in order that state that AIs need to pay taxes too, and do some wealth redistribution that way…
Maybe capitalism is now broken and we need something new to help us deal with post scarcity socially.
I for one welcome our new Starfleet overlords.
You are missing the point of why AI is being hated so much. Sequencing was just a tool for you that made your job easier. Right now it almost feels like CEOs can't wait to use AI to fire everyone
It helps that research assignments have a certain amount of people-power available, to which amplifiers increase the work done. Many businesses have a certain amount of work to be done, so amplifiers reduce the people needed.
That's not even accounting for AI's unique ability to trick CEOs.
>So what is he supposed to say?
How to deal with it. Spitting "deal with it" at the audience just says he was so unprepared that he didn't even realize he was literally hired to give them that send-off guidance. But being skilled and notable in a field doesn't make people insightful.
Good one.
Because people like Eric Schmidt are constantly talking about how AI is going to make the careers they just spent 6 figures learning to do obsolete.
How delusional do you have to be to give a pro-AI speech to the generation most likely to be directly fucked over by AI if your other predictions are true?
It's a college graduation speech, he's not required to touch on any specific topics.
"AI is going to upend your nascent adulthood and career" is pretty tone-deaf when delivered by a semi-retired billionaire who was was neck-deep in a conspiracy to reduce wages in his industry barely 20 years ago.
> But why so anti AI specifically?
because they just spent $200k on an education that this man is telling them is worthless now, and how that's a good thing for them.
Maybe these "thought leaders" should be showing the kids unsure about their future a path forward instead of just spouting the AI hype.
> But why so anti AI specifically?
also, because one college did it and got famous on the internet , and now all the kids want in on it.
He can shut up?
we could just ban so-called AI "music"
nothing bad would happen, no one would lose anything
aha, lot of slop fans here
Tech execs made choices that made the public hostile to AI. They told everyone they were going to lose their jobs a not participate in the upside (implication: they get all the wealth). They cozied up to a corrupt administration that stripped public benefits while enriching themselves (now from tax dollars). They forced towns to accept environmentally toxic data centers that take their water/power
We’re all going to suffer the economic consequences of being left behind in AI (and other fields) all because execs wanted to double down on privatize the gains / socialize the losses.
Totally. As I've commented elsewhere, they thought it would be a great time screwing over artists and other culture works to make quick bucks and outrun the law.
Turns out that culture workers are a big chunk of who sets the narrative for the mainstream, and especially younger generations.
> They told everyone they were going to lose their jobs
They didn't just tell everyone, they stopped hiring and started firing despite already making double digit YoY profits.
There was an effort to disinvite him as soon as it was announced that he was the speaker.[1] And then when that failed, activists passed out flyers encouraging students to boo Schmidt during his speech.[2] This all took place before he set foot on campus because of alleged sexual harassment.
This wasn't about what everyone wants it to be about.
[1] https://tucson.com/news/local/education/college/article_078e...
[2] https://tucson.com/news/local/education/college/article_ab7e...
He wasn't the only one being boo'd for AI though. I heard a podcast where they played clips from at least 3 or 4 different ones
The kids are alright.
Every one of these posts about boos at commencement speeches has one of these comments near the bottom. I feel like I’m failing some pop culture quiz. What does this mean?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Are_Alright_(song)
in contrast with:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Kids_Aren%27t_Alright
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
Indeed, and while they did the recording for Dark Side of the Moon he miraculously, almost creepily appeared in the studio. They did not recognize him - bald head and all.
I did not know Sid got dozed without consent, but this is not something to do to people. There was knew a girl who was doing it and eventually everyone figured out and started avoiding her like plague.
It's a song by "The Who". Though given the controversy their lead songwriter (Pete Townshend) has been through, I personally would refrain from quoting him on the topic of kids.
As others point out, a song by the band, "The Who". But it's since come to be a phrase to suggest that the upcoming generation (the kids) are going to be okay.
As opposed to the more common refrain of "the kids these days…" (and then append some generational gripe like, "are just weed-smoking, lazy, game-playing, phone-staring, TikTok-headed, etc…"
Other than the TikTok-headed part, the phrase could easily be applied to at least as far back as the 80s (NES) depending on definition of game-playing. Before then, there was foosball and pinball. Nevermind the kids that play card/board games. Also, while not staring at a phone implying smart phone use, it was often said about teens having a phone growing out of the shoulder from them constantly being on the phone with friends.
So, yeah, kids these days...are just like the generations of kids before them.
And what is tiktok if not MTV on steroids
It's personalized and made by peers vs professional Hollywood productions. Of course, I'm thinking about original MTV and not whatever it evolved into with reality crap programming.
Right, but it still has the same kind of energy as MTV. Music, counterculture (to en extent), and crude humour. It got to the point where when Beavis and Buthead got a reboot, they reacted to tiktoks
Which is a good thing.
Kids these days ruining their brain by writing things down.
AI is largely unpopular outside of the tech & business worlds. Most laypeople see it as falling on a spectrum between unwanted and annoying (google getting worse, AI chatbots proliferating in every app and site) to actively harmful (jobs being replaced by ai).
The fact that comments agreeing with this sentiment get downvoted here isn't a huge surprise, hn is firmly inside the tech/business world.
Most people will experience it as sludge, if they experience it at all. Countries that do not aggressively regulate AI out will see our already profoundly eroded customer service ecosystem disintegrate completely. The already opaque and awful systems that determine things like access to credit or access to healthcare will become even more opaque and inscrutable and produce measurably worse outcomes for actual humans.
This is kinda obvious to most people, who are already experiencing an enormous amount of sludge in their daily life.
Tech-bro optimism in the face of GenAI is so painfully decoupled from lived reality it's frightening. Tech has not made the world a better place for most people over the last fifteen years, and it is poised to make things much, much worse.
For what it's worth, you're probably downvoted way more for the whole "woe is me, I'm always downvoted for being right by people who are wrong" false martyrdom routine. Maybe leave that part off your post next time: it only detracts from the rest of it.
You might also refrain from generalizations like "hn is firmly inside the tech/business world". HN is not a single person, there are a variety of people here with a variety of experiences and opinions and biases.
HN, also renown for people with a compulsion to generalize generalizations.
What's this have to do with the thread you replied to?
And... anyway... Google just changed its homepage to make "AI Mode" / LLM responses the norm. LLM usage is just going to be the norm for the foreseeable future. Doesn't matter if a wary set of "laypeople" are reticent. They're still going to ask Google questions and be affected by it in their digital lives.
Correctly or not (probably to some degree correctly) new grads are hearing AI is a major reason why they're having trouble finding jobs which is simultaneously 1.) Probably mostly has always been the case--I no longer have the vast sheaf of rejection letters when I ever got one at all and 2.) Is anecdotally actually the case for a variety of reasons that also include pandemic overhiring and probably an out-sized AI effect on junior engineers, probably especially programmers.
I think the overhiring sentiment is largely accurate, but not as it’s frequently presented.
It’s not purely over hiring, it’s that many of these companies are doubling down on AI spend(in terms of model creation, hardware investment, etc), and need to allocate their funds differently.
So it’s not AI efficiency causing the layoffs, it’s AI resource allocation.
And the reason they don’t have the funds to invest? Overhiring.
A lot of the companies doing layoffs (META, Microsoft, Amazon) aren’t just using AI coding tools, they’re trying to be the hardware and be the models behind the AI.
And they see the failure to do so as an existential threat.
I think it's more than that. They've heard for most of their lives that college is the way to a good job. Now they're graduating, many of them with debt, and as they do, they're hearing that AI means that the jobs won't be there. And now, at their commencement, someone is talking about AI. One of the people responsible is talking about AI!
Who thought that this was going to go well?
That's all fair. Whether or not AI is the/a primary factor in the challenge in getting entry-level/junior roles especially in tech and especially in relation to the milk and honey situation the past decade+, I'm sure a lot of grads struggling to get interviews believe it is. Which makes a commencement speaker associated with Google and AI a rather tone-deaf choice.
this isn't the first instance of society failing to deliver on its promises - I'm almost 40 and still no house. What makes this time different, I think is the question?
did you have a real estate developer come and visit your school and talk about how the surging house prices were really helpful for them
I think this is just it being blatant. it doesn't necessarily mean anything will come of it but of course tensions will be high if you get an ai pitch instead of a congratulation speech
Agreed, AI is a convenient excuse. If we had covid level interest rates these graduates would have a lot easier time finding a job. Companies are downsizing their bets and counting pennies to cash flow to invest in AI infra, which they wouldn't need to do in a low interest environment.
Discussed here (2 days ago): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177785
other recent related submissions based on searching for "commencement"
- Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt booed at Arizona U commencement speech https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48204166 - 26 points | simonebrunozzi | 5 hours ago | 6 comments
- Why College Grads Are Booing Their Commencement Speakers https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48200823 - 6 points | 65 | 13 hours ago | 1 comments
- Graduates are booing pep talks on AI at college commencements https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48196546 - 116 points | 1vuio0pswjnm7 | 19 hours ago | 179 comments
- Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107 - 163 points | wrxd | 2 days ago | 167 comments
- Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48175130 - 4 points | mgh2 | 2 days ago | 0 comments
- University of Arizona students boo Eric Schmidt's AI cheerleading https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48171852 - 103 points | latexr | 3 days ago | 1 comments
- UCF Commencement Speaker Draws Boos After A.I. Remarks https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 - 11 points | reaperducer | 5 days ago | 13 comments
- Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674 - 182 points | cdrnsf | 9 days ago | 217 comments
- UCF Commencement Speaker Booed When Calling AI Next Industrial Revolution [video] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094523 - 6 points | latexr | 9 days ago | 2 comments
And here yesterday (different source): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48198281
Schmidt will get over it. In the coming unrest/wars, he will profit nicely from all his investments in weapons and surveillance.
nah, he's gonna be in the line of head spikes
He keeps his Gulfstream fueled and ready to go to Cyprus, where he bought a passport. In Cyprus there is an international "elite" of Western and Russian oligarchs.
i want them to do the atlas shrugged thing so bad. it would end so funny.
I suspect general attitude to AI will split along those who had to apply for jobs in the post-AI world of automatic resume generation and filtering and those who didn't.
If I were an adversary of the U.S. I would encourage anti-AI sentiment among young people, to my strategic advantage.
They don't need much help, the industry's incentives are not aligned with the public interest.
Disruption, by definition, has winners and losers and the losers tend to be more visible, more vocal, and more immediate than the winners.
Who do you imagine the winners and losers will be? To the extent AI is useful and disruptive, it's best utilized by people with capital. Which is to say, the winners are few and the losers are everybody else. In this case, the losers aren't just more vocal, they're louder and more visible because they're much more numerous.
See below. Small business owners who learn how to use the tools right are one example.
We're talking about an entire generation being impoverished and powerless, and the response from people like you and Schmidt is a dismissive "winners and losers". If this is the whole plan from AI evangelists be prepared for a heck of a lot more blowback.
If you care about society and this technology reaching its potential I hope you find your way to "yes" on giving a shit about other people.
Who are the winners? Where's the profitable billion dollar industry?
I’ve been a small business (manufacturing) owner for about 25 years. AI saves me time, extends my reach and reduces my time to market. AI isn’t a threat to me; it’s a daily tool I use. I’m also a former SWE - I took time most of Anthropic’s courses to maximize my ability to leverage the tools. It’s a win/win for me.
That assumes that there is benefit to be had in all this AI craze. So far, none has yet materialized.
How many of those booing used AI to do some of their homework?
What are you trying to say? That AI benefited the students because they skipped their homework?
I am trying to understand how many of the students are complaining about AI when they themselves may have been using it a great deal. Because that seems hypocritical.
I can be pressured to use it at work to keep up with others who use it, while simultaneously knowing that it is eroding and devaluing my skills, and wishing that we could all stop using it together.
It is not hypocritical to hate tool you use. Likewise, it is not hypocritical to dislike people you work or live with.
And it is not hypocritical at all to hate or dislike or fear impact of a thing you used.
You can watch Schmidt's commencement speech here, at 2h:13m:05s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1eM3jv0vWY&t=7985s
It seems like they start booing him pretty close to the start, and pretty often.
Apart from being tonedeaf, this stuff just strikes me as very lazy. Who still needs to be told that AI is new and transformative? Getting the privilege of monologueing to a crowd of people on one of the biggest days of their lives, and then just throwing out a bunch of obvious cliches... pretty damning imo.
Absolutely, great graduation speeches are unique and from the heart. They don't sound like a sales pitch for the latest trend or thing, and mentioning AI shows how clueless theses speakers are.
I think the one steve jobs gave at stanford is a great example
I think this is the key point. HN commenters on this thread and related ones like to assume everybody’s an activist luddite but actually I bet the majority of the audience is just rolling their eyes at the amount of open doors being kicked in while being forced to sit still and listen to that drivel.
Which is why they booed the mention of AI specifically, surely.
It's because they're bored of the speech, not because they're angry at the hearing praise for the technology that is poised to fuck up their careers and futures
You can be pissed off about AI without being an "activist luddite" you know
The word "Luddite" is no longer such an insult as it once was, by the way, now that everyone realises they had a point.
All right, I read the Eric Schmidt speech and it's fine https://xcancel.com/Jason/status/2056413992369676293?s=20
It's not "out of touch" or rubbing everyone's noses in it or any of the other nonsense that people are talking about. It's got a pretty clear thesis: this is a revolutionary technology of a kind that many of us thought impossible even within this last decade; and it hasn't been fully defined what its use and shape will be for humanity; and then there's a note of optimism in it.
As far as I can tell this is a pretty decent commencement speech. It's not "disconnected from reality" or "living in a bubble" or "spiteful" or any of these other phrases that people are using.
A commencement speech has to address the elephant in the room: this present revolution. It has to exhort the students on to something: which this aims to do. And it has to present challenges in order to do so: this does that as well.
It is absolutely disconnected from reality. An old billionaire does not in any way understand what new graduates are feeling and fearing about AI and its impact on the world. He has not existed or lived like any normal person does for decades at this point, and holds significant blame for the current state of tech/AI and everything that comes with it.
A commencement speech should leave people motivated, not feeling like they’re about to be economically replaced before even starting their careers.
"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.
It's tempting to assume malice, I don't doubt some of them really are so spiteful, but I assume most are just that out of touch.
It's ironic that these speakers tout AI benefits but failed to use it to learn what college students are concerned about
Why would they? It's so trivial to do it yourself, it's easy to imagine what they're concerned about. Things like the optimal number of agents to deploy in their swarm, the best way to use AI to route yacht and private jet movements between your residences, what kind of AI business to start after graduation and how many billions to invest in it.
They aren't out of touch when it comes to the prospect of cutting jobs and how it will pump their stock portfolios. They are drooling so hard the big risk is that they make the axe handle slick and throw the axe instead of slicing the job prospects of those in the audience.
"Wait, those are real people whose jobs I cut? I thought they were just numbers"
I don't know if you're aware but a big meme at Google from when Eric was CEO was when he was encouraging all googlers to install Nest in "one of your homes"
They’re so disconnected from reality, living in their own bubble.
Their behaviors feel so detached and alien to me. Here are my hypotheses:
- They love AI and are so self-absorbed that they struggle to think of other people's perspectives. They only view it through their own lens and are oblivious to it. So, to them, others' opinions should mirror theirs, which is why it doesn't register for them.
- They know of the impacts their ideas will have, but think that the positives will somehow eventually trickle down to the commoners and the negatives will be minimized or only affect people that 'deserve it'.
- They genuinely despise young people and this is just a socially acceptable way of expressing their hatred - they understand everything.
Which one of the three do you think it is? Or are there other reasons?
It’s just a completely different class + being an exec requires certain personal traits. These two combine to whatever we see nowadays. You can call it detachments or whatever, but to be a successful exec you basically have to be a big asshole and a giant owbua.
Basically they believe whatever they did is righteous in a religious way, and how can you not see it? These types of thoughts.
There is no middle ground.
If I had to guess, I'd say it's a non-zero, but double-digit percentage of each of those, depending on the person.
you could have stopped with AI makes them rich. Why cares about anyone else.
But it's not that simple. The point I'm making is that their reaction to making money also feels very inhuman.
Suppose your comapny just won a key contract, putting your competitors out of business. Would you go to stand on a stage in front of the other business, gleefully talking about how your victory will upset the industry? How it's a sign of the changing times, but a blessing in disguise because those employees get a chance to move to another career, or practice valuable budgeting and social skills in the line to the food bank?
Yeah, they're fucking sociopaths. We have enough history at this point. The results are in. The verdict is clear.
>Their behaviors feel so detached and alien to me.
Because they are. Extreme wealth is literally a brain disease. It is physically impossible to remain a normal empathetic human being with that level of detachment from reality. Back when things were 10x, or 100x difference, there was still some amount of reality that just couldn't be abstracted away from you having to deal with. But the modern day reality of >1000x disparity has completely removed that, and they are more or less living as demigods to us in comparison.
> Perfect, that's exactly the message of despair we want to send! (How I imagine picking these speakers goes at every college campus)
AI-era commencement speeches should totally be gloating "Ha, ha! I'm going to get immensely rich, and most of you fools are going to end up in the gutter! Sucks to be you [sticks out tongue]! Great for me, me, me! AI. Is. Awesome."
I bet "deal with it" is exactly the kind of inspiring message these kids were hoping to hear.
Your comment really drove home for me the lack of empathy and humanity in these speeches, even neglecting the AI stuff. These young people are celebrating a real accomplishment and a life milestone. They’re about to enter a world where their decisions will shape our society. In that context, a speech like this is just gauche.
They will deal with it alright.
It's only so many speeches like this before the boos turn into other things.
Absolutely. They have no idea the vitriol my classmates have for them. I really am worried, lot of friends are very casual about their extremism. When anger and disgust is the feeling of the majority: it’s only a matter of time…
i think we should not think they are gullible but they want to make they think they are. they want a message through and the message is that they are creating a threat and they will use it.
For what it's worth, this might not be a recent phenomenon only. My dad has been saying for decades that the speaker at my mom's college graduation (Paul Tsongas, if I'm remembering correctly) was incredibly depressing and basically just said "the world sucks out there, good luck going into it".
Mine was "The world sucks. We need brilliant people like you to save it. Please help."
That was the gist of mine as well. "There are too many problems and too few people who care. So please care, and don't let the size of the problems keep you from caring."
“And don’t get distracted by money, fame, and power like I did.”
In nyc, elder rats have been known to encourage younger rats to take the first bite, to determine if the food is poisoned
what do people need to hear? inspiration or truth? Personally I want the cold awful truth. But I think humanity in general thrives on inspiration and delusion.
Cold awful truth is fine, but people do need some perspective.
What they should be saying is "yes this new technology is going to take away all your jobs, which is why I am fighting for universal basic income".
The truth cannot be either cold nor awful.
It appears you prefer dressing up your feelings in stoicist aesthetics.
Like a snake pretending to be a statue.
What people need and should hear depends on the situation. When you visit a dentist, you don't need to hear about how to properly build a house, no matter how truthful it is. You should hear truth about state of your teeth. Or, if you are having a wedding speech, you should not pontificate about how to keep the bathroom clean - even if what you say is cold hard truth.
Second and importantly, it is not like these commencement speakers would be concerned with truth or were trying to convey truth in their speeches. The dilemma here is not "truth versus inspiration/delusion". Schmidt was not selling truth, he was selling his product and was trying to make people believe things that will make him earn more. Schmidt want trying to sell inspiring vision of the world for the students, he effectively put them into a passive-you-dont-matter role in his vision.
The first step in resolving any problem is acknowledging that it exists. Ignoring real issues in favor of comfortable narratives is insane.
College students had 4+ years to learn about the real issues before the graduation ceremory, and the rest of their lives after it. Rubbing every problem in the world in their face at a graduation ceremony is just gauche.
To everything a time and a season. Not every second has to dedicated to "problems".
Totally agree, cut the kids a break and give them a pat on the back and tell them something inspiring! Try to remember what it was like to be in their shoes on that day.
Edit: I don’t mean “kids” in a condescending way, I just mean young people taking the first steps into adulthood and careers.
"Not every second has to dedicated to "problems"." I was a lot quicker to agree with this sentiment in prior decades where we had notionally fewer of them, the big ones seemed better understood, and the folks managing the levers of power at least managed the appearance of competence.
There has never been a commencement speech made when the speaker couldn't have spent the entire time speaking about problems. Ever. Not even one. It has always been possible to spin an hour of doom and gloom about the future, based on 100% real problems.
A commencement speech is not the time or place for that.
I'm not saying it has to be 100% upbeat each time, just that it is not the time or place for an enumeration of problems.
It won't even do any good. What are they supposed to do with this that they weren't already doing? It's not like the world was sunshine and rainbows for all of them up to this point and the commencement speech is the correct time to disabuse them of that notion. This isn't your one chance to reach them with news of doom. It's your one chance to send them off and maybe encourage them to fight the doom. It is appalling to miss out on that opportunity because you've got an axe to grind and don't understand that not every opportunity to grind it is appropriate. Actively depressing and discouraging them is almost certainly achieving the opposite of what even you want to achieve.
I think in this case the speaker was talking about a "solution" which the students perceived as a "problem"
Slightly facetiously, but also completely seriously: I thought the speaker was talking about a "solution" that explicitly frames the students as the "problem" - and the students noticed.
I think the speaker was talking about a "problem" which the speaker perceived as a "solution"
Yes, and the audience noticed that his solution was a solution to the problem of "how do I multiply my $40B net worth" and not the problem of "AI blasted the job market how do I pay rent?"
This will go over great at weddings and birthday parties!
We need to fight for a better world, but that requires that we're not burnt out by thinking about our problems 24/7. We need some fun and joy to make the fight worthwhile.
Like I wanna stand here and listen to a tech billionaire run through a list of shit he did to my generation.
I am a teen, so I want you to consider yourself in the shoes of us youngsters.
you grind for 4 years, you might have student debt or a substantial loss of family income as it was invested in your education (I am assuming 30k$)
Now the whole purpose of it was to educate you, now some people cheated their way through with AI or whatever in the education system.
So the whole thing ends up going to the job market and well the job market isn't doing good.
There are multiple (and I mean multiple) factors for the job market to not do good but its not a overexaggeration that people at the top who have influence might be more prone to AI psychosis (Read mitchell's tweet) and how they are all announcing that AI is the reason why you might not have jobs.
Then, you have these same people come to you on stage and say to integrate AI or use AI and this AI that AI.
What would you as a student do in this? Would you not feel angry, frustrated, would you not disagree and you all don't have a mic and can't cut off that speaker with words.
The only thing that you can do to show disagreement is to boo, it takes one kind soul's immense frustration to boo and then everybody would join, would you also not boo if that was the case, to show your disagreement
To finally have a voice because their boos had voice larger than many things which is why we are discussing it here and people are discussing it!
"The only thing that you can do to show disagreement is to boo,"
thats only if you ban water bottles at such speeches.
But at the same time, I cannot disrespect teens by lying to their faces.
I just graduated, my friends and I have realized that these older generations are just ladder pullers: they hate us. I’ve watched my classmates politics and outlook become more extreme over time. I don’t think I have any respect for older generations anymore, I was never this jaded before, but my classmates say more extreme stuff.
I'm also a recent graduate and I can confirm everything you've said. Both me and everyone I know in my age and social group are feeling more hopeless and jaded than ever.
What are your classmates saying? Since our class has little to no power, representation or money, I'm very pessimistic about the odds of anything ever changing.
Hey, which college or country are you from? if you aren't comfortable with it publicly, you can send me a mail. Asking because I am curious although I might be 4 years younger than ya (going to a college rather than getting graduated)
I am actually at a bit of cross-roads myself as the degree would cost 30k$ where I live (for context I live in India) and so the competition and job market is so much that I would only recoup the tuition fees in 2 years. There are some other colleges if I just wanted a degree for the sake of it which are cheaper but literally 0 companies come to them and I would have to look for higher studies (masters). I would actually love some suggestions, I have went more in depth at: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48097377
I am unsure of how much the industry might change 4 years from now, my only idea is to probably learn more about how things work and to have them around my curriculum and get good grades as this time it would be something that I am interested about (I wish to learn compilers, fpga, for some reason I really want to read golang codebases), I don't know how the job market might be when I land but its really messy right now and I am sorry that you are in the crossarm of it all.
I once made a project[0] on how many words a person has written on hackernews and you have written 60k words on hackernews and so have been a very decent member of it and I think that's because of not external factors or goodhart's law where something becomes a measure but rather because you genuinely enjoy doing these things. I completely understand your pessimism as I feel like I might be in the same boat albeit younger but it feels incredibly unfair to me for all the things that are happening in the world.
I think that being part of the community shows a level of curiosity which is atleast worth a interview or to get to know them more about it, I think that all you want is just a way for you to prove yourself and your skills. I urge the more experienced folks who might be looking for an applicant to perhaps show some support to @tavavex and give them an option to explain themselves.
Not sure if an interviewer reads it and you would actually get an interview and more chances to prove yourselves but the job market is so fundamentally broken at the moment with fake jobs and so much weirdness that even seniors sometimes don't find jobs & another part is that as college graduates, we worry about all the money and time spent on it and all we want is a fair chance. So I just hope that my comments atleast tries to nudge it towards that, perhaps I recommend taking part in the who wants to be hired thread within HN too.
Sorry this got long but I understand this struggle in some sense and its hard to explain but I have tried to try to do best in both explaining it and hopefully helping you out and I hope that you find a decent and stable job.
[0]: https://serjaimelannister.github.io/hn-words/
Mate just because you spend more time staring at a screen wringing your hands doesn’t mean there’s notionally more problems
collage students had 4+ years to be gaslit, and redirected from what they were indepedently discovering, toward subservience.
The "boos" are an indication that kids finally understand who to blame. In a dark time, that's a ray of hope: the kids are alright.
> the kids finally understand who to blame
You do realise that “sticking it to the man” is something that kids are uniquely good at?
This isn’t something that’s only just happened in the last generation. It’s how society has operated since before we lived in caves.
The increased younger vote for Trump is a big part of our current set of problems.
Remember: Google was declared a monopoly by Bidens Justice department. We were setting up a system to break down monopolies and restore order to the market. Trump got rid of that.
The problem was Trump marketed himself as being anti-establishment (like many far-right parties do) and people fell for that crap.
It’s the same problem time and time again. people conflate regulation with “the establishment” when in fact it’s usually strict rules and processes that prevent us slipping into a dystopian nightmare. But of course people make this mistake because the same people who stand to benefit from deregulation are the ones pouring millions of dollars/pounds/or whatever your local currency into convincing people that the issue was caused by someone else and can only be solved by removing those safe guards we needed.
I dont think so. Trump promissed male supremacy and many men liked it. The move toward Trump is in men specifically. If it was about establishement, women would move the same way.
Trump also promissed that it will be ok to mistreat some groups and people who hated one of those groups loved the message - sometimes even when they were members of some of those groups.
But, the young voters moving to Trump was male thing and 100% based on misogyny and male supremacy.
The last batch of kids was blaming their job woes on mexicans, women, and authority figures delivering mild punishments for shouting trans slurs. This batch seems more upset with the billionaires or at least AI. That's a big improvement.
There is more than one kind of kid at a time.
And "graduated college" is a well document splitting variable for the clusters you mentioend.
Mmmhmm, and tech workers tended to blame Indians instead of Mexcans, women were less keen on blaming women, the woke percent never went anywhere near 0, and Captain Obvious is a full time job. Observations about the general sentiment of a crowd do not in any way imply uniformity, and it's frankly a bit silly to pretend that they do and then get upset about it.
And they’re not going to do anything about it, just boo on command and go to work
They might once they try to work and can't find any because the entry level positions have disappeared thanks to AI.
That statement makes sense for Eric Schmidt but not the random real estate executive. I'm pretty sure they're just taking their anger out at the nearest target
lol the real estate executive celebrating how they've using "AI" to destroy the housing market is maybe not just the "nearest target"
Before GenAI came for their jobs, real estate was more extractive on the younger generation and it wasn't close: the median financed phone is $30/mo while median rent is $1500/mo. We generally find RE less interesting here because it has a scale ceiling and low returns-to-intelligence (compare Elon Musk to Donald Trump) but it's the oldest hustle and it never went away.
Commencement is a time of celebration and accomplishment. The students are well aware of the existence of the problem; that's the exact reason they're booing.
It's like going into your therapist's office and having them trauma-dump on you. Their issues might be entirely legitimate; it's still not the time or place.
For comparison, see Mr. Rogers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=907yEkALaAY
How come the problem isn't that "lots of people really don't like AI"?
"We're all trying to find the guy who did this" - guy dressed like hotdog
> Some of the loudest hostile voices were reserved for Schmidt’s comments on AI, however. “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts you could never accomplish on your own,” comparing it to a “seat on a rocket ship.” He also suggested that the students will be the ones to “shape artificial intelligence,” even if they “don’t care about science… because AI is gonna touch everything else as well.”
The Google CEO claiming he and other tech billionaires gave you a seat on a rocket ship via AI is not "acknowledging a problem". Booing something you consider a problem is a form of acknowledgment though, so I'm not sure how you can conclude that the speaker was the one doing what you suggested and not the audience here. Do you really think "AI is like a ride on a rocket ship" is an acknowledgment of issues rather than a "comfortable narrative"?
Okay, show me where these commencement speakers are acknowledging that AI is a problem.
> Schmidt, who served in various capacities as CEO, Chairman, and technical advisor to Google and its parent company Alphabet across several decades, ...
It is gratuitous to say “several,” no?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt
From all the articles I see about him I feel like he's constantly paying money to get in the news / social media.
Just like Mickey Rooney's span of being the top box office draw from 1939-1940. :)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UDQfFtiOk4
"Deal with it" is the response these CEOs give.
Well, don't be surprised when society starts to regulate or even outright ban AI and data centers. Companies will need to "deal with that".
If you don't want to be booed at while yapping about AI during a commencement speech, then maybe you shouldn't be doing that in the first place.
AI is hitting junior positions way more than senior ones right now, and students with no professional experience are exactly who that affects most. They're walking into a job market where the kind of role they were supposed to start in is shrinking.
That said, booing a speaker mid-speech wouldn't be my move on my own graduation day. But I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't be grinding my teeth in my seat.
Once the rest of the crowd is booing it seems pretty safe to join in.
This is like the 4th post I've seen on here about the exact same event.
Meanwhile they're doing all their homework and tests with AI
Goomba fallacy https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Goomba_fallacy
That's what I'd be curious to know. Are they the same people who are booing it who are also using it?
Not necessarily contradictory. If all your peers are using AI, you might feel you have to use it too to avoid falling behind… especially with curved grade thresholds
Why put in the effort if a potential employer can't tell.
Next time just let AI give the damn speech and be done with it ... LOL.
2 days old news OP;
[dupe]
The American Rebellion Against AI Is Gaining Steam
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48188310
Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419
Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48096674
Multiple commencement speakers booed for AI comments during graduation speeches
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48177107
An AI Hate Wave Is Here
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48173318
I wonder how many of those booing used AI to write their term papers. From the teaching side, I hear AI has become an epidemic of students scamming their way into degrees.
Yeah, it is incredibly tone deaf.
I can fully understand some executives trying to hype up AI with the "It'll create more jobs!" mantra, but as it happens, the AI boom coincided with the post-COVID layoffs (from the hiring frenzy we saw back then) - so even though AI might directly not be responsible for less junior/grad hiring in the various industries, the vibe is that it is still responsible for the tough times college grads are facing.
I am starting to see so much consistency in the "it's not AI, it's overhiring" commentary that it's actually starting to feel like a narrative constructed to allay concerns about AI impacts. At this point it's a "pandemic overhire correction" that the industry has been doing for two years, and is accelerating.
Yea, I don't know how long they're planning to milk the "pandemic overhiring" excuse. Ten years? In 2030, we'll still be seeing headlines like "Company X lays off another 10,000 workers due to overhearing ten years ago..."
The over hiring explanation will only last so long - you can't really say we were still over hiring after about 2023, right?
So by next year you'd expect that shedding to be mostly done I think. and then companies no longer hiring juniors to train up will be obviously ai related
I thought Fauci's comments were pretty good. Just common sense stuff about using critical thinking when confronted with misinformation/disinformation.
1hr 36min
https://www.youtube.com/live/RyWsFYj6380?si=p2W6ih3USKdyDLY1
Needs more booing. These so-called rich people have the gall to say, “You guys are going homeless, and there is nothing you can do about it. However, please use AI.”
They just have not considered the massive shareholder value being captured, which under capitalism is certainly guaranteed to trickle down, as it had been historically proven time after time.
</s> ?
The parent comment was so sarcastic, it actually defeats Poe's law.
Most Americans directly own stocks and a college graduate is even more likely to. This isn't the 1860's so a lot of these critiques of capitalism are anachronistic. The reality is "shareholders" are fairly ordinary people and not a tiny and mysterious group of elites.
First, trickle-down economics is a modern neo-liberal concept.
Second, most people just do not earn enough to invest a significant amount of money in stocks. It's a system that largely benefits the rich. The more money you already have, the more you can invest.
AI Bros are spending too much good will being obnoxious about fancy approximation algorithms, when their purpose in real AI will be lizard brain/reflex type actions.
The next AI winter can't happen soon enough. (Note each past AI winter did give us new tools just like this one will, it's just a shame that it'll be an excuse to worsen customer support)
Unfortunately this AI ship has the US economy lashed to its bow, and the moment it begins to founder we're all going to have to hold our breath for a while in the best case. Thought leaders are all out of ideas that don't have AI in them (and even that ideation is probably being delegated to an LLM these days).
Unfortunately, this is typical of the feral business overclass. It seems that the rampant Trump regime, the advent of AI, the long-term decline of the United States, coupled with the complete impunity the business class were granted during the 2008 crisis, has gone to their heads. The hate saddens, but doesn't surprise me.
"Your boos mean nothing, I've seen what makes you cheer."
There's an interesting duality. If you are someone people can target with relentless online harassment, you should be mortally scared to share your honest opinion.
If you are not, like Eric Schmidt's, there's absolutely no reason to care what other think.
By rejecting AI, these students have a particularly bad future ahead. Rejecting reality doesn't make reality bend to you. Due to this rejection, they risk having few jobs, then no jobs. The Schmidts of the world have negative sympathy for such deniers.
They aren't rejecting it at all. They are expressing their opinion on it which is hugely negative. Why? Because it's a useful technology, but so far has succeeded in taking jobs away, poisoning minds, art, and politics, hoovering up all the capital, and getting shoved into every possible thing.
The billionaires tell us over and over, "Get on board or you'll starve!" and I am certain they will be stunned when they meet the rude end of a pitchfork.
Edit: I did not intend to advocate violence, just warn about public opinion. Please do not harm anyone.
It’s a real feeling… lot of hatred for older gens now …
Please don't use HN to advocate for violence.
Apologies. Did not intend to advocate, but I will be more considerate of language in the future.
> They aren't rejecting it at all. They are expressing their opinion on it which is hugely negative.
It is one and the same.
> I am certain they will be stunned when they meet the rude end of a pitchfork.
Is that a threat? Also, do you understand how the police and government work, and whose side they will take? Even if magically the government were on the side of the luddites, which they won't be, China would then take over the country hurriedly by its embrace of AI. This is why the US military is embracing AI. I don't think you or the graduates have the faintest idea of how aggressively and pervasively China is using AI.
> in taking jobs away
The people should be asking for basic assistance benefits, and the graduates should striving to automate more so that even more people can have these benefits. This is the only answer that could be fully consistent with reality. Doing repetitive dumb work is appropriate for ants, not humans. These graduates want a salary without competitively delivering value, and that's not going to happen.
China? A New York Times article reports that a Chinese court has ruled that layoffs justified by AI are illegal. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/business/china-ai-unemplo...
The firms will obviously then just use any excuse that doesn't contain the word AI. Money to pay salaries is not free.
Regardless, at best it protects existing employees. A hiring freeze will still block new workers.
At the very least, the Chinese government has made its official stance clear—though you could interpret this as a way of saying, “Don’t make me clean up your mess.” Companies will weigh which side entails higher costs and actively explore other avenues, and large corporations won’t dare to act brazenly.
If AI becomes very powerful and poses a high risk of replacing ordinary workers’ jobs, this approach will be more effective. For now, however, the market itself may still be able to handle the situation.
> 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 far. China taking over the country would be a massive improvement, but they're going to do that by prompting, "Chat take over the US"? Unlikely.
> The people should be asking for basic assistance benefits You have resigned your agency as a free human being. We are just a bunch of humans on earth. If we all decided AI was bad enough we could ban it. The people don't want basic assistance, they want a say in the direction of their lives. At the moment, their lives are being directed by billionaires and those who saw a fancy chatbot and decided to willingly become a serf.
When you say China taking over do you mean economically? And how does this scenario play out?
China will be able to offer substantially better value for money for goods and services too, more than they already do. Imagine the cost efficiency of DeepSeek but for robot rentals. Those using manual labor will stand no chance.
Read the room pal.
I’d be anxious, too, if I were just starting my career. Those kids just invested a lot of time and money in an education, and the payoff looks a lot like a gamble.
But AI is going to help, not hurt in the long run. Technology always makes things better and cheaper in the long run. Poverty diminishes, free time increases, things truly do get better over time. This’ll be a short term bump, but it’ll be a steep one.
Your viewport is too zoomed out. When you zoom in on the march of human progress, you'll find a lot of spikes in the amount of human suffering along the way. As we start to hit the limits of what Earth can sustain, do you really feel confident that the next spike will dissipate quickly?
How short term do you think it'll be, and how confident are you in that?
If it takes until these kids are in their 30s their careers will be pretty affected. "maybe the next generation of kids after you will be fine" isn't super comforting.
If the genAI cheerleaders are correct, and this is a change much like the industrial revolution, then things will be horrible for the average person for multiple generations.
Are you willing to join in the suffering in the meantime? That's what everyone saying "it'll get better in the long run!" seems to ignore.
> Technology always makes things better and cheaper in the long run.
How so?
> “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 boos.
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."
Tim Robinson in the hotdog costume loudly exclaiming "we're all trying to find the guy who did this"
God I love that video (sketch? I forgot where it came from but I originally saw it on youtube)
It's a skit from the show "I think you should leave". Generally absurdist skit comedy.
I thought that might be where it was from, but I hadn't seen it and its been so long since I've seen the skit that I forgot where it came from. Thanks :)
Imagine bringing a new technology into the world, telling everyone it’s gonna take everything from them including possibly their literal lives, and then telling a bunch of kids to get on board or they’re gonna miss the billionaire rocket ship! lol these people are so out of touch.
imagine using that rocket ship analogy in a world where OceanGate happened. You don't get on a moving ship without asking questions.
From the same guy who was part of a conspiracy to suppress wages in his industry. He's completely tone deaf. Not that I'm surprised coming from a billionaire tech executive.
The same people who are being boo'd for being AI tycoons would have been cheered by the same students 4 years ago for just being tycoons.
I hope everybody reflects on the fact that it's the same people.
Am I out of touch? No, it’s the children who are wrong.
I'm not blaming the kids. They are a reflection of society as a whole. It's just a statement of how a significant portion of society have changed their views of tech billionaires over the span of just a few years.
Listen, right now the children are tripping over themselves competing to be worst possible people. They witchhunt on AI, antisemtism is on the rise including all of the stock cannards, they have turned hating things into a fucking performance for clout. I want to be able to like the younger generations but there is no getting around that sometimes the kids really are fucked in the head.
are you proud of being old and not being able to emphasize with the younger generations?
I feel like I see this a lot. oh I'm so old bla bla bla I don't get this oh I have no idea why xyz...
if you're young right now, your future seems to be certainly fucked.
do you think the youth is going to be all upstraight and say "take the bull by its horns!" as they give up any hope of owning a house or having a family?
but I guess they are "fucked in the head". they should be appreciating the S&P500 all time highs on their 401ks... oh right, they're not part of the gravy train. whoopsie
These older dudes are just ladder pullers, they’re always talking down to us. We don’t care anymore. They're shocked by our behavior? They should take their own advice: accept reality, deal with it, this is the future.
Did you expect them to cheer on a billionaire that had a direct hand in fucking up their future? In this case the hate is rational if you ask me, and I’m a late millennial.
If your behavior doesn't change when you realize the world has changed, that's a bad sign.
So, the change in behavior by the students is a good sign.
No? What is this ad hominem?
This isn't true at all
Cotton plantation slaves drown out cotton gin-praising introduction speeches with boos
Seamstresses drown out sewing machine demo speeches with boos
The serf class really thinks they’re “upper middle class” don’t they