Graduation season is here again. Several speakers this year found it difficult to get graduates excited about the future that artificial intelligence will shape.
Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida where she acknowledged that we are living in a time of “profound change” that is both “exciting” and “difficult.”
“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared. Students in the audience began booing, which grew louder until Caulfield, giggling, turned to the other speakers and asked, “What happened?”
“Okay, I struck a chord.” she said Caulfield tried to resume his speech by saying, “Just a few years ago, AI wasn’t a factor in our lives,” but was interrupted again, this time by loud cheers and applause from the audience.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt had a similar reaction when he mentioned AI in a speech at the University of Arizona last Friday.
In Schmidt’s case, criticism began even before his speech actually began, with some student groups demanding that Schmidt be removed as the commencement speaker due to a lawsuit filed by his ex-girlfriend and business partner accusing him of sexual assault. (He denied the allegations.) According to local news reports, the booing started even before Schmidt went on stage.
But Schmidt was met with loud boos when he told his students: “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” As boos continued, Schmidt argued, “Now you can have a team of AI agents to help you with things you could never do on your own. If someone asks for a seat on a rocket ship, they can just get on without asking which seat it is.”
To be fair, AI is not going to be a third rail. every Graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s graduation ceremony and didn’t seem to get any backlash when he said AI had “reinvented computing.”
Still, it’s not at all surprising that some students feel like heckling. In a recent Gallup poll, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said now was a good time to look for a job locally, down sharply from 75% in 2022.
This pessimism is not just a response to the rise of AI (a change that worries even some software engineers), but journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant has suggested that for many students AI has become “the brutal new face of hyperscaling capitalism.”
“If I, too, was in my early 20s, unemployed, and had more aspirations for the future than getting an LLM, I would boo loudly at the prospect of the next industrial revolution,” Merchant wrote.
‘Resiliency’ was a recurring theme this year, even when AI was not explicitly mentioned in commencement speeches. Schmidt himself acknowledged that “there is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that jobs are evaporating, that the climate is being destroyed, that politics are divided, that we are inheriting a mess that we did not create.”
Meanwhile, Caulfield may have misread the audience for arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before even mentioning AI, Caulfield had already begun to lose it with his “generic” praise for corporate executives like Jeff Bezos.
Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times, “It wasn’t just one person who actually started booing. It was kind of a collective action, like, ‘This sucks.'”
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