Commencement address season hasn\u2019t been going well \u2014 for the commencement speakers.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve seen the videos on social media. The big shots who have been brought in to inspire a next generation of graduates have used their speeches as opportunities to extol the limitless possibilities that artificial intelligence will bring. They\u2019re speaking to graduates who are entering a shaky job market and are already burdened by tens of thousands of dollars of student debt. However, companies of all stripes are using A.I. as an excuse to slow entry-level hiring and lay off workers. Tech executives have been warning (though it sometimes seems as if they are bragging) that their technologies will be job destroyers.<\/p>\n
Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive who spoke at the University of Central Florida\u2019s College of Arts and Humanities, told graduates<\/a> that \u201cthe rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.\u201d Scott Borchetta, the chief executive of the record label Big Machine, told the graduates of Middle Tennessee State University that \u201cA.I. is rewriting production as we sit here.\u201d In each case, the students expressed their displeasure at the speakers\u2019 blatant A.I. boosterism the best way they could: with loud boos.<\/p>\n When Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, told graduates<\/a> at the University of Arizona about their A.I.-shaped future, the shouting got so intense that he paused and said<\/a> that graduates feared \u201cthat 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.\u201d Mr. Schmidt told them to make the best of it. \u201cThe question is not whether A.I. will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Schmidt\u2019s solution to world-upending technological change is \u2026 what? To pull yourself up by your bootstraps? His approach is peak billionaire brain, directed at the young people who have, for the better part of a decade, been treated as woke, lazy, avocado-toast-eating snowflakes. All these speakers just don\u2019t get it. The problem isn\u2019t woke; the problem is work. It\u2019s a lack of social mobility. It\u2019s that college may no longer elevate a graduate to the middle class. It\u2019s that nobody even bothers to pretend that a house, a good job and the ability to start a family are at all guaranteed.<\/p>\n Think of this from the graduates\u2019 perspective: Wealthy old people telling you your future is being pulped by acres and acres of electricity-sucking, water-guzzling data centers feels dystopian because it is. Companies are trying to automate your future away. No wonder you\u2019re furious.<\/p>\n Young people are facing what M.I.T. Technology Review calls a \u201clooming crisis in entry-level work<\/a>,\u201d and college, once assumed to be a prerequisite for a secure job, no longer feels worth it. The general gestalt coming from a certain sliver of affluent Americans is that college graduates are more liberal trouble than they\u2019re worth and perhaps could be replaced by bots. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and G.O.P. megadonor, mused to Joe Rogan<\/a> that a bot \u201cnever gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high\u201d and \u201cnever files H.R. complaints.\u201d (It never boos a smug commencement speaker, either.)<\/p>\n