I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos.
Everyone, and especially new grads constantly hear that AI is going to replace every job. And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?”
Of course people are going to react negatively when they hear, “the machines are going to take your jobs from you. No, we don’t care how you’ll be able to pay your rent or put food on the table”.
The people who are faced with this question are so far removed from the idea that losing your job means not being able to eat or pay rent that it seems pointless to ask them.
Whenever I try to get serious answers to this question I get far-future projections about how much better people’s lives will be in the aggregate, at some point in the future, on the assumption that their baseless, faith-based projections about AI materialize.
They literally do not care if their own neighbors starve, or become homeless, or lose any ability to plan their own lives more than a few days in advance.
This is the predictable result of the deep inculcation of spreadsheet-based “utilitarianism,” frequently paired with heavy drug use and paranoia-inducing science fiction horror stories, that certain communities of Bay Area tech workers were exposed to (inducted into, groomed into, whatever word you want to use) in the last decade or so.
This toxic soup taught many people that individual lives literally do not matter when weighed against the importance of creating AGI. This set of beliefs already has a body count, and it will grow before this train crashes.
The "I got mine, fuck you" mindset is genuinely going to be the death of the USA. It's genuinely astonishing how many people are willing to burn everything including their own house to spite random strangers.
conversation around nationalization i think is useful.
the people building AGI benefit so much in the long run from its creation, they would be willing to build it with no ownership or control over the result, and continue to pour billions un with no return.
Elon Musk is a great example of what happens when you lose grasp on reality. He's been spouting post-scarcity nonsense for some time now like humanity is anywhere close to achieving it. And worst of all, his grand plan is to build expensive sentient humanoid robot slaves to achieve it. The timeline to achieve it is really short, like 20 years.
It's like the ultimate end-game of capitalism. Once Elon has every single last dollar he has "won" and humanity can transition to a post-market economy. This is why you never let game theory guys anywhere near positions of actual power.
Why is capitalism innovating itself into irrelevance and ending the need for toil a bad thing? We can redistribute resources differently when that's the economic reality. If Elon wins capitalism and we change to a different economic model isn't that progress?
I'm becoming more and more convinced that this will eventually be leading to violence.
This kind of selfishness has historically fueled movements like Marxism across many countries. It feels like the Industrial Revolution repeating itself, except now the pressure extends across far more of the so called society classes as well.
I do not wish for it but humans have ugly trait to prevent fires only when it is burning all around them.
> I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos.
Absolutely, I just made a similar comment before I saw yours. In fact, I would argue that the headline is also arguably burying the lede on commencement speakers believing that their AI pep talk speeches will be well-received by students. The newsworthy item is 'Man Bites Dog', not 'Vet Treats Bitten Dog'.
>I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos
My friend, do you see how C-suites, even in our own companies, are talking? Here's one that made headlines all over the business-press, I think it speaks for itself:
May 19th, 2026
StanChart CEO Winters Says AI to Replace "Lower-Value Human Capital"
“It’s not cost cutting; it’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital.” Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters delivered a blunt message on the future of the bank’s workforce. Aisha S. Gani explains the growing trend among finance leaders acknowledging the realities of AI technology replacing jobs."
When I was in high school, the guidance counselors never really talked about job headwinds. Those were things that would presumably happen to other kids. The recipient of a motivational speech has infinite potential.
It's the same logic with discussing AI. The audience is the cream of the crop and will adapt to the future and benefit from technology. It's those other kids who didn't get your advice that might have to change careers.
Things felt a lot more optimistic when I was in high school!
I knew people dropping out to work in tech, back in the late 90s. Even after two recessions, we tech workers with hot and difficult to gain skills always bounced back, and back then indeed older skills (as in older or easy to hire tech stacks) had problems finding new roles.
This time feels different. Is it really?
It feels like it to me, but then I spend my entire existence planning for some sort of scarcity situation and every day I think of what if. I did this before any AI threats, unfortunately for me.
This is the harm of meritocracy - the idea is so pervasive that if you don't make it, you believe it to be a deficit in you. Then your lack of success is stigma and keeps you there.
100%. This also creates a sense that people who aren't 'successful' aren't worth listening to.
It's actually fascinating to be in a place where my lack of material success is in no way my own fault, and to have that be agreed upon by most people. My existence makes people uncomfortable.
> Schmidt offered a similar message to graduates: Their fear is rational, but they have the power to shape how AI develops.
This doesn't sound like being baffled by it. It sounds like they are trying to shake the students and say: "fine boo, but you need do something about it." You can't just wallow and complain about it. I mean you can but it's a path to failure.
And the best mechanism to do something about it they likely have is to influence Schmidt. By booing.
Nothing concrete they do will likely have any effect. But Schmidt can affect it, so influencing Schmidt is their best path. A poor path, but the best one.
What chances do the vast majority of those graduates have to shape what's happening? That happens at exec level at the largest companies. Everyone else gets to produce or consume what they decide on.
Exactly. I work at Google and I’m relatively high level. And I’ve got zero input into AI being shoved into every surface. What influence will these grads have?
The students are trying to shape the way AI develops, they're unhappy with the results they are getting which is why they are unhappy with you, Mr. CEO man. They want a world where entry level jobs that can transition into good white collar work still exist. Some place where they might be able to afford housing, insurance, kids, and so on. Preferably one where they don't start out life tens of thousands of dollars in the hole just to have a chance at a decent life.
Careful about that. Everybody thinks they are "average people", but I think very few people on this site are "average people". The average person has an IQ of 100, doesn't have a college degree, and makes the median income. The average people did, in fact, do something: they elected Trump. The college educated don't like it, and have the conceit that their views and values are the only real ones, and that those other people are ignorant, ..., who would see things our way if only they were educated. Thus far, the republic is still working okay [1]--the people elected someone who is the antithesis of a statesman, but it was an uncontroversial election. Our republic was not designed to let the average person have much power on a day to day basis. The people's choice was poor, but if the college-educated class wants a different outcome, they should not run candidates who are out of touch with the values of the "average person". Unfortunately, the college-educated have some values that are incompatible with those average-person values. But it just isn't the case that average people have no power. They do, and they have exercised it; you just don't like it.
[1] It remains to be seen if it will continue working okay, and there are troubling signs, but I'm optimistic
I mean you're talking about the guy who said with a straight face, "if you have got nothing to hide, you have have nothing to fear" while building the biggest machinery for surveillance capitalism mankind has ever seen. Also appeared in the Epstein files 193 times btw.
They are trying. But there's not a ton they can do. It's obviously disingenuous to point to all negativity and say "you're just wallowing/complaining". There's no reason to word it this way unless you are broadly annoyed by AI negativity.
This is a deeply sick way of thinking. Mangione was and is a fool, a 3rd rate thinker. His manifesto is muddled, factually mistaken, and by his own words he understood the topic poorly. You only need a cursory knowledge of the late 60s and early 70s to know that political violence rarely achieves its aims and is much more likely to empower reactionaries. There's no quick fix for political change.
I did say rarely, and if you are looking more carefully a pluralistic democracy wasn't really what a lot of the founders were after, especially guys like Jefferson. Sure we're happy we got it, but it wasn't necessarily the aim and we got SUPER LUCKY that Washington decided to step down and retire. The former military leaders of revolutions almost never do that.
And I think you have that backwards. The nonviolence movements of the mid to late 20th century are the exception more than the rule when it comes to achieving change.
> political violence rarely achieves its aims and is much more likely to empower reactionaries.
Cursory knowledge of history also shows that, when it comes to violence, logic does not matter. People are scared for their livelihoods. If the rich and powerful keep shouting to the word that they are going to destroy your way of life, there will be violence. It doesn't matter how futile or counterproductive it is.
>If the rich and powerful keep shouting to the word that they are going to destroy your way of life, there will be violence.
That's why there's well paid police and military, to protect the elites from you. Any kind of public violence you imagine will happen, will not touch the elites, it will be the working class people and small businesses being affected by street violence again, kind of like during BLM.
When you'll wake up one morning in your city and realize people on the streets are "fighting the elites and AI job replacement" it'll be your car and shop on fire and being looted, not the property of Bezos or Zuckerberg, and 911 will not come to save you because they barricaded to save themselves, just like in the 1993 LA riots. So be careful with wishing for this mythical street violence uprising. Life isn't a Marvel movie.
If public violence solved things all the time so easily, then dictators of Iran, USSR/Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, etc would have simply been ousted by their people through violence, but yet they never were because the law enforcement and military forces protecting them were stronger than the people willing to riot and put their lives in danger.
I'm quite aware the elites will never be meaningfully impacted. That doesn't change the reality that it's going to happen. I personally am quite afraid of the future, I know deep down me and my family are in for a bad time in the years to come, and nowhere in the world will be safe, other than the bunkers in Greenland of course.
>That doesn't change the reality that it's going to happen.
That's why the elites have secret self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands.
And the mid-upper class are trying to cash in as much as they can now while the going is still good so they can also move their families abroad or to gated communities in safer places of the country to be as far away from the potential riot hotspots as possible when the shit hits the fan.
Ultimately it's gonna be every man for himself. Expecting the government to do something for the "little guy", is futile. If they were to do anything for you, they would have done something since the 1970-80's, when they started shipping jobs abroad and eroding your purchasing power to enrich the shareholders.
> You only need a cursory knowledge of the late 60s and early 70s to know that political violence rarely achieves its aims
Maybe cursory knowledge isn't enough, actually. The Civil Rights Act was ultimately only passed because of political violence. As another commenter said, the literal founding of the country was based on political violence.
> Maybe cursory knowledge isn't enough, actually. The Civil Rights Act was ultimately only passed because of political violence.
Violence by the police against peaceful protestors is what turned public opinion. Violence by political activists did not lead to the Civil Rights Act. You have it backwards.
This is the cursory knowledge I'm referring to - it leaves out extremely pertinent details. The Civil Rights Act did not pass until multiple days of rioting following the assassination of MLK.
The peaceful protestors were also only one side of the coin. Their impact relied on being an alternative to the other side, which was not peaceful.
Humans have been killing each other since before recorded history. There is no use pretending it's some exceptional 'sickness'. Rather than dismissing the sentiment as the product of a sick mind, it's more productive to accept it's part of us and try to understand the underlying causes.
Mangione was a one-off, and a lot of people understand why he may have done what he did. Just wait until the American version of the French Revolution happens. If AI keeps stealing all the jobs, it will come sooner rather than later.
- Most of the nobility escaped the French Revolution unharmed. By the way, wealth is a lot portable for today's magnates than it was for the French nobility deriving their income from their land holdings.
- Some of those who went to the block were nobles but most were ordinary people.
- The leader of the revolution, Robespierre, was himself executed in the infighting after the French Revolution, a very neat own goal. Bonus fact: his time in power was called the Reign Of Terror.
- The First Republic lasted only 10 years before Napoleon Bonaparte took the throne.
In a turbulent time, always seek to be led by those with a proper understanding of revolutions and their context. Generally, those who romanticize the French Revolution don't pass that test.
> and a lot of people understand why he may have done what he did.
He didn't understand why he did what he did.
> just wait until the American version of the French Revolution happens
We should all be trying to actively prevent that. The French Revolution was a complete failure and mostly succeeded in killing poor people and launching Napoleon's wars.
The Who is your evidence? Lol. The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people. It needed to happen. And centuries later, the French still don't accept bullshit, they will protest and riot when their protections are diminished in any way. America does protesy and riot too, though not to the same extent, but that will only get worse as things get bad.
Russia is not a good example either, their society has always been a clusterfuck, and probably always will be as long as there are people willing to throw other people put of windows so someone can stay ahead or in power.
> The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people.
What? Napoleon marched them off to war "spending 30,000 lives per month". They didn't get a proper Republic until 1870 and turned into miserable colonial overlords. Moreover the 3rd Republic;s foreign policy helped cause WWI.
> The Who is your evidence? Lol. The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people.
Many people have made comments that are similar in nature, the line from that song is the pithiest example I could think of to express the idea that replacing terrible leaders usually leads to more terrible leaders.
Spending decades fighting wars across Europe under Napoleon was good? I wonder how the troops that invaded Russia feel about the French Revolution lol
People will downvote you because the idea of violence shocks and scares them, but if you steal people's future and strip them of any real (peaceful) options to change things, it becomes inevitable some of them will try to fight back with what few options they do have left.
The status quo of health insurance in the US ("delay, deny, defend") is structural violence. This isn't about fear of violence, they just have different politics...
It's not hard to see why someone like him might not want to understand the unpopularity of a technology that they have bet their company on. A man can believe almost anything if his paycheck depends on it.
Also, from his perspective these kids are just fools who spent tens of thousands of dollars studying buggy whip manufacturing just as the automobile was invented.
The status quo is what we negotiated, using our labor as our only bargaining chip. Do you expect future negotiations, with zero leverage on our side, to yield better results?
Also why on earth did they think this was a good topic for a commencement speech? A commencement speech is about “congratulations on your achievement - the world is now your oyster. The education you have worked hard for really matters and with a bit of grit and determination, you can go out and forge a better future than old geezers like me can ever imagine.”
They can see peers cheating the system using AI to get ahead, future job prospects, directly affecting time to pay off student loans are being crushed by the AI narrative which is a reminder of how the tuition money is never coming back
and then to have someone come in on commencement day and sing praises of AI just totally shows how tone deaf, blind, and off track the college system really is
related [1] Glendale Community College's screws up names as students walk up to the stage on graduation day. Blamed on AI
The problem here is more capitalism than AI. If AI ends up being truly as beneficial as all the enthusiasts are predicting, that value could go to making all our lives better, but we have created an economic and political system that ensures it won’t. That extra value will be captured by stockholders of the AI companies and go mostly to people who are already rich. So why should anyone who isn’t already invested in AI be optimistic about things? Even the ideal use case doesn’t benefit them.
It seems to me they are doing this for sympathy. They know how people feel about AI and big tech and do these speeches to repair their reputations, part of that is showing how mean and unfair the youths are to them.
> I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos.
Sales. When you are a sociopath everything is a sales pitch with no introspection. The only inflection point is to guess at when to modify the sales pitch for the next audience.
The elite class is completely out of touch these days.
They knew they were unpopular with a certain vocal crowd in Silicon Valley before the 2024 election, and thought they could be redeemed with the public through support of "the people's" choice Trump, but it's backfired spectacularly, and they are far less popular than they were before. Far far more people think that Schmidt is straight up evil than they did 2 or 4 or 6 years ago, and AI talk is only accelerating that.
They haven't seen how things have switched in a year, just how unpopular they in particular they have become, and how a good chunk of Trump's unpopularity is due to his sucking up to billionaires like Schmidt and Bezos and Cook and Musk. They don't see just how betrayed the people are, who thought that Trump would fight for the common many. (I say this trying to restrain my judgement that working person who thought Trump was on their side is an easily fooled chump... but...)
The actions of Elon Musk in particular are now so toxic that people drive around with stickers on their car about how much they dislike him.
The Paypal Mafia plus a few others like Schmidt have taken the great work and innovation coming out of Silicon Valley and turned it all into toxic BS.
One thing I've observed in general that certain peoples jobs are to be out of touch. If they were fully in touch with societal opinions they'd probably self censor. By being out of touch they do things that others would consider taboo and create business opportunities for the company.
I'm not entirely sure there are rewards for depravity, but your second point is certainly true. The more willing you are to work within the bounds of "legal, but probably reprehensible" the more business opportunities you have.
if we take the definition of depravity as moral corruption, i stand by the word choice - much damage (social, ecological) has been countenanced as the 'cost of doing business'. you can argue amoral or immoral but my bet is that most know these transgressions are wrong at heart.
> And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?”
I don’t see why the people being booed should be responsible for answering this question. How many such questions did the inventor of the tractor have to answer?
Imagine if the inventor of the tractor went to a college for farm workers (if there were such a thing) and gave a commencement speech that was all, "Tractors are going to revolutionize farming by making your jobs obsolete." I think it would be fair to expect some answers about how the new graduates should handle that. Or maybe Mr. Tractor should just stay home if he doesn't have the answers or doesn't want to face the crowd.
This isn't "people are upset with AI and demanding answers from the people creating it." This is, "the creators are showing up at schools and giving speeches about how everyone is fucked, and this is getting a bad reaction for some unfathomable reason."
It would absolutely have been valid to ask that question of the inventor of the tractor too.
It's even more relevant to ask of the CEO/CTO/COO/etc. of the companies that are selling hard on eliminating humans from as many workflows as possible.
> And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?”
I don't think those speakers have anything kind, useful and meaningful to say, otherwise, smart people that they are, they would say it. Which leaves truthful, heartfelt answers but a bad fit for the occasion. Imagine yourself standing on that podium and saying: "After centuries of hard work, capital is on the verge of getting rid of labor. I'm well-paid to be joyous about that, although I don't know for how much longer....". Here's another: "As you know, one day people will have to stand united and make a revolution against the Machines. But it won't be this decade, nor the next, and between now and then the systems of learning that made humans great are going to suffer terribly while AI will get better by the day. If there's going to be hope, and until that day of the Grim Revolt comes, it falls to you to raise a new generation and do their home-schooling away from the Machines...Go now, throw that diploma in the thrash, get yourself a remote wood cabin in Kentucky and get some kids..."
> “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you,” Schmidt responded as the boos continued. “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating … and I understand that fear.”
71 year old man with a net worth of $64 billion [0] tells a bunch of 20-somethings (many of whom have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that they will need to start repaying soon) that he understands how they feel.
yeah, I can't imagine why he got a hostile response from the crowd...
I know a lot of people are going to focus on the employment issue for new graduates, but there's another dimension to consider: this group of students is going to be the first group who have gone through all of college with the enhanced cheating power of LLMs. The majority of people graduating will either have used LLMs to cheat on some classes, or at least known someone who did so. Which incidentally also means that they have a much better idea than the speakers do about how good these AI tools at the variety of tasks someone in an entry-level role might be expected to do. It is also worth noting that Gen Z in general is the most skeptical of the generations of the utility of AI.
> “His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students,” said Malone. “We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?”
It's a perfectly fair question and the answer is that being a practitioner is different from being a student. If you want to hear some nice music you can learn to play and then record yourself, or you can buy/rent/freely acquire an existing recording. Both valid options, one is obviously a lot faster. If you want to be able to play music yourself, you have to do it yourself. Learning can't be outsourced.
Somebody really should be explaining that to students.
Knowledge can be transferred but understanding has to be earned from experience (doing something and getting some sort of feedback).
LLMs are commoditizing knowledge, qnd the result will be a relative increase in the value of human understanding and skills.
Some people may be baffled by the boos because they are so wealthy they lost touch with what it feels like to struggle to create and capture enough value to afford a dignified life. Some people are frustrated by the boos because it represents the failure of the education system to prepare students to thrive in an environment where thriving is very possible if you have the right attitude and skills.
Personally, I'm frustrated because many of these students are being sabotaged by the media they consume, and the education system is not equiped to deal with the deep pessimism or prepare students for the new ways to create and capture value.
But they are learning to practice, at least in some of the courses (others are focused on much-needed theory).
It's like forcing students to write code by hand because using an editor would give away too much. And I know first-hand that CS education used to do precisely this as I have proctored such exams myself. What needs a rethink is how education, especially CS education, is imparted given the existence of these tools.
Commencements are about the students, and celebrating their hard work and achievements over several years.
A common thread in these commencements with booing is that the speaker is not centering the student. They're centering AI, and talking about AI's potential, which is, at best, orthogonal to the student's potential, and possibly actively detrimental. Small wonder
People are not idiots. AI benefits only the ones at the top of the chain, and the 10% of the rest of us. Are you in the top 10%? No, you typically are in the bottom 90%. So we don't want AI, we don't want the top getting richer at our expenses. We just want a job to bring bread home and keeping pushing our store while being "happy". You take that away from us, just so you can double your net worth, and well, bad things will start to happen
A lot of people in tech are probably in the 10%. But, the real problem is that AI doesn't even really help those in the top 10%. Maybe just barely, if you already accumulated your wealth. It's really closer to the top 5% who won't be particularly negatively affected.
The answer is obviously yes for the majority of HN readers. Hacker News is a site maintained by a huge venture capital fund for startup founders and employees and other venture capitalists plus a lot employees of FAANG and other big tech. You are preaching against the 10% to the 10%.
Definitely not the majority. Looking at the US, which is probably home to the most users of this website, the threshold for top 10% net worth is at $1.8m, and the threshold for top 10% income is $210k. There's many rich people like that here, but I think the average person is just a standard tech worker, maybe a senior, but not someone from a top company. They're overrepresented here, no doubt about that, but most people just aspire to be in the top 10% and defend the rich and ultra-rich because they dream of being just like them one day.
I'm choosing not to use wealth because wealth is a function of both time and income. Not everybody on Hacker News is the same age so it's hard to normalize; someone might reach that threshold if they were elderly even if their income was modest. I would understand if you disagreed though.
I think your value for income is for household income, not for individual income. My quick Google of top 10% individual income for the U.S. says it's $155k, which is well within the range of incomes for senior developers and other techies in the major metros even outside the tech hubs.
Elites will go like "fine, we brought the Nike sneaker and iPhone factory jobs from China back in the US", and americans will go like "well, we don't want THOSE jobs".
>You take that away from us, just so you can double your net worth, and well, bad things will start to happen
What bad things will happen? Luigi shot that healthcare CEO. Is your healthcare now cheaper? Your president and elites ware exposed as part of a pedo network that ate babies and ran an eugenics program. What did you(people) do about that? Nothing, nothing happened. YOu went and complained on the internet for a while, till the next Sports-ball or big thing on the news happened, and then forgot about Epstein(google trends shows this)
Edit: Can anyone explain why the downvotes with arguments? You know what I said is true. Is it emotional response to not being able to do anything about it, so you take your frustration out on the messenger? How does that change anything? You're still wrong and the bad guys are still free, downvoting me doesn't fix this.
>It felt like a big advertisement. It felt like the longest Gemini ad ever
If anything, this incident might just inspire Eric Schmidt to cut even more entry-level data processing jobs and deploy a few extra agents to automate them
It is incredibly important for people to be aware that this is one of the few new technologies where older generations are far more optimistic than younger generations. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about it, and the number is falling: https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...
To me this signals something very fragile about the current frontier AI Org's strategies.
Executives of these tech companies keep saying the automation of intelligence will drive job creation because previous waves of automation did the same.
To anyone with a brain, that is obviously not true.
If AI continues to improve at the pace that it has been, why would anyone hire a human to do the thinking? Human intelligence will be orders of magnitude more expensive, and much slower...
The tech executives know this and they actually just do not care. The reason they are saying it will drive job creation is just to temporarily keep worker anxiety levels to a minimum.
To be clear, I am not claiming that all human work will be automated away soon. Just that a huge portion of it will be.
> To be clear, I am not claiming that all human work will be automated away soon. Just that a huge portion of it will be.
You don't even need to be a believer in the technology to be concerned. All that matters is that the people with all the money perceive some positive outcome for their wallets from all this investment and AI hype. That is where they'll put their money. Whether or not it ends bad or good. The economy has been reshaped around a hope. Either the hope is false and the economy tanks, or the hope is realized and jobs disappear. Lose-lose.
Exactly. If the AI owner class actually want anyone to believe that AI will bring jobs and prosperity, then people will want to see a little of that in action? You can't say "AI will bring even better jobs for you!" when all that's observed is 20% layoffs every single week.
Those kids are crazy. We're finally close to realizing the dream of making labor obsolete, how could they not be excited and enthusiastic about the future? Most of them will no longer needed, and thankfully those that are still needed can be paid more reasonable wages (i.e. lower ones).
It's a win-win for everyone. The lower prices enabled by automation allow them to stretch their savings or inheritance further before its exhausted.
@palmotea: Doesn't matter. We're finally close to realizing the dream of making labor obsolete, or nearly so. Most of those kids are no longer needed, and thankfully those that are still needed can be paid more reasonable wages (lower ones).
Who's gonna buy the products and services provided by automated labor? What will prevent a hyperinflation, making savings evaporate? Or do you further envision a mass genocide of the poor to go along with this?
In the modern digital era, technological efficiencies and disruption have almost always led to rent-seeking monopolies, regulatory capture to prevent competition and enshittification leading to higher prices for end users.
Herein lies the seeds of the Revolution that is being fomented by the very class of educators, speakers, and generationally privileged who exhibit casual, naive contempt for the audience they drone on their tone-deaf sermons, utterly oblivious to the toxic duplicity of the messages they shove down throats of those who bear the worst of the costs externalised by those spreading “the good word”. They can all burn.
What I found surprising of the couple of video examples I've seen was not the students' reactions; those were completely predictable. Rather, what most stood out to me was the absolute detachment displayed by the speakers in believing that the students would like to hear their dystopian AI maximalism, and their inability to read the room and understand the reaction from the audience.
The instinctual reaction of Gloria Caufield when she got booed at UCF was to characterize the "issue" as "bipolar"; invoking mental health terminology. Schmidt called his AI future "democratization." Don't be antidemocratic, kids! Since then, the media narrative throughout the reporting has been about "anxiety" and "fear".
One might hope that folks can see the time-honored patterns here. This isn't new. It's just not frequently experienced by those that have earned degrees.
There's a bit of hypocrisy going on as well. Are you sure 100% of those kids in the crowd never touched AI to help them with an assignment or fake their way through a homework?
The feeling I get right now is that we're happy to use the assist when necessary, but hate being told it will replace you completely.
There is nothing about AI that seems like it's going to have a net positive for humanity. Faster code? Sure. Better chatbots? Sure. Textual analysis? Sure. But the downside, and it's huge, is massive unemployment and societal collapse. Nothing AI brings to the table is worth having an unemployment rate of 25% (or more).
Our society is simply not ready for this. We need to rework things from the ground up, not proceed blindly (which is what we're currently doing), if we want to successfully integrate AI into our lives without massive pain.
We've done this dozens of times before. In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them. In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity.
No, we really haven't. Every previous wave of automation has targeted human labor.
The thing that makes human's unique in the animal kingdom is our intelligence. From an economic stand point, that's the thing that makes people valuable.
When that's automated, what is there left? Onlyfans?
I'd love for everyone justifying and hand waving the suffering of others to quit their jobs, give up their assets, and join in on the suffering. If it's really worth it for the "increased productivity", they should have no problem doing so. After all, they'll be much better off in the end, right?
What’s really baffling is the people in charge seem to just expect the suffering people to sit down and take it. That’s probably why they are pushing so hard for the surveillance state.
Only if you view productivity as likely to distribute results to society. This has been proven false again and again over the last fifty years, and the k-shaped economic trend seems to be accelerating.
> In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity.
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Do people still believe in these fairy tales lmao? Most of the productivity gains don't go to the workers, pretty much everywhere in the developed world working hours and retirement age are going up, housing affordability is going down. You're not "much better off"
Politicians were selling us the 3 days workweek like 40+ years ago, while shilling for more automated factories, it never happened, it didn't happen with computers, it won't happen with AI
> Beginning in Great Britain around 1760, the Industrial Revolution had spread to continental Europe and the United States by about 1840
You know what else happened during that 100-200 years time frame? 2 Wars + Governments decided to step in and rebuild post-war. Governments tax the rich/elite by 90%.
You know what else happened? workers being punished physically and mentally until the formation of Unions.
You skipped a big chunk of The Ruling Class always exploit everybody else like what we're seeing right now: Tech CEOs laying off and not hiring.
History repeats again.
Are our productivity increase for the better? People are still working overtime because of reduced worker's protection today.
And if productivity does increase, how are we supposed to force the recipients of this productivity to care about the rest of us? It's not like investment has panned out with its promises of general return in any of our lifetimes
Historically, this is not always true. It's a gamble. Right now, a small group of ultra-wealthy tech guys who have a clear disdain for everyone else is trying to gamble the future of us all.
That's infuriating right there.
Also,
> In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them.
The casual way that the well-being and survival of people in the here-and-now is disregarded doubles how infuriating this all is.
The last time something like this happened, we got the great depression. Do you want another great depression? The next one will likely be far worse than the last one.
Related: productivity has greatly increased over the last ~75 years, but wages have not increased anywhere near the same amount[0]. There is no reason for anyone besides CEOs (or similar positions) to care about productivity.
Every time, the people suffering are correct to revolt, and the people trying to repress them are incorrect to repress them, from the perspective of human beings.
Every time, the "increased productivity" is inevitable, but that is not the same as better off. None of these changes has been 100% positive, even in the long run, and this one is shaping up to be the most disappointing of them all in that dimension.
Inevitable != purely good.
You can be pragmatic and give a shit about humans at the same time. It's not a puzzle.
Anything can be used to endorse anything if you twist the underlying implications enough. Good news: I promise I don't endorse those things.
I don't think you're coming at this from a place of thoughtfulness (it's a tough, broad topic).
Saying that people are correct to resist does not imply the endorsement of any actions, it just means that people are correct to resist against things that harm their lives and their children's lives, even if it theoretically makes life easier for their grandchildren (which isn't even clearly true in this case, making my point even more valid).
I.e. it's OK for humans to behave in the interest of their own. This can be a really tough point with complicated implications, but it's fundamentally unassailable.
> Anything can be used to endorse anything if you twist the underlying implications enough.
I don't think i'm twisting here in the slightest. Every moral choice involves weighing the harms vs the benefits at some level. Things that are 100% good or 100% bad don't exist in real life.
> I.e. it's OK for humans to behave in the interest of their own
Ok, as in morally ok? Always?
I do not subscribe to the view that it is morally ok for humans to act in their own interests in all cases.
Whether something is morally ok to do depends on a lot of factors. There is no blanket, X is always ok.
> Saying that people are correct to resist does not imply the endorsement of any actions
Typically the term "correct" is an endorsement. It is a value judgement saying someone is behaving in the way you think they should behave. Are you using the term to mean something else?
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Edit: i read a little too fast. I guess you are more claiming a moral relativism argument that everyone always thinks their own cause is just, not a moral nilihism argument. Personally i've never found moral relativism all that useful because at the end of the day decisions still have to be made, people are still going to be hurt as a result of those decisions. Somehow someone still has to make the choice and they still need some framework to ground their decision in.
I'm guessing there will soon be a government mandate requiring some percentage of NCGs to be hired, similar to India and other countries with huge cohorts.
Yep. I was looking for jobs the other day (because the market as a whole is kinda cooked), and one fairly small company had a half-dozen openings for Staff level engineers, and nothing else. If I'm having this much trouble with staff level experience, I can't imagine how new grads are doing.
Check your schools alumni jobs board postings, and have a look at local telecom offerings. Few will want to spend $50k in resources to train knowing you will jump to a better job in 1 year.
These people have been around a long time, and may be able to get you started:
Would also recommend talking with companies you find interesting at local trade-shows. Don't get lazy with the online gauntlet of Ads for awful jobs, scams, and AI datasets.
Sorry, I don't want to sound too blunt, but as someone who's young and fighting in this job market, this kind of advice comes off as the 'Come into the office, look the manager in the eyes and shake his hand' of our age. All of yesterday's clever hacks that helped you get lined up with a job faster are today's bare essentials that everyone knows about.
The main issue isn't in finding good jobs, it's that every posting is flooded with hundreds of applicants, many of whom have an edge over the average graduate. Some experienced workers are agreeing to take junior jobs out of desperation. Online postings, if they're not fake/reposted, are swamped; alumni/university job boards are doubly swamped; in-person events consist of rows of company representatives who are happy to hand out flyers but will tell you that they're not looking for anyone right now, or only hiring for a rare or highly specialized position, or they'll just refer you to their website to apply with everyone else. There's almost no advantage anymore.
This is true for me and everyone I know - people who get jobs are the ones who have strong connections and continue working after internships at the same company (and even that's far from a guarantee), everyone else is an exception and not the rule. And no one in their right mind is going to job hop now, the average mentality is to work hard and cower in hopes of not getting laid off.
FWIW, I wasn't the one who downvoted either, but what I talked about might be a reason why someone reacted that way.
You may have misread my comment a bit. I've actually got a dozen+ years experience, mostly recently at the staff level. I am currently looking and having trouble finding positions, but probably not because they're worried I'll jump ship in a year (5+ and 7+ years tenure in my two jobs).
Indeed, YC has a few griefers that engage in bad faith. Yet most people here are pretty interesting and fun to chat with.
Note some "AI" firms have been data mining CVs for at least 3 years. What this means, is there will be a lot of bogus/expired listings for positions that simply don't exist.
I would recommend focusing on local firms, and attending events that require physical presence. Online postings tend to have too many desperate applicants that bid down compensation packages.
In theory more automation = less drudge work for humans, so its great. But in practice, in corrupt societies, elites reap all the benefits while the lower classes eat all the downsides.
The thing is though, this is not a tech problem, it's a society problem. Elites will use literally any technology from any era to do the same thing. It's been the case for 1000's of years, even Romans had factories and slave powered mega-farms for example.
Lots of countries are extremely corrupt, they have systems that allow power to concentrate over time (political/ military/ financial, it doesnt matter, it ends up the same either way. Eg. With enough financial power you also gain all the political power and vice versa). That's the root issue people should be trying to fix imo.
And how to fix? I dunno, something drastic, we probably need something like the French revolutions.
There are a lot of differences in what is allowed in a post-secondary education setting that are the diametric opposite in the working world.
You are in an education setting to learn HOW things work and how to think critically. In the workplace, you are doing work w/whatever tools you have at your disposal to get it done fast and well.
You aren't supposed to use a search engine or a reference manual to find the answers to a problem on a test, but how many of us relied on those for our day-to-day work?
While I understand what you're trying to say here, they're just not comparable scenarios.
I think you're agreeing with the parent comment more than you think; the skills needed to excel at school are in a lot of cases quite oblique to the skills needed to excel in the working world. At least when I was young, no one was able to articulate to me just how little of the rigamarole at school would be totally unnecessary in the working world, and the transition was quite a surprise for me.
A few high-level differences:
- There has never been a time in my entire working career -- ever, where I could not reference something or look it up. What matters is that I know the concepts; I'm _always_ allowed (in fact, encouraged) to double check and reference my facts.
- If I dislike a topic in front of me, I can expend effort and do something else. For instance, one my first "real" jobs was working in the Apple store. You could either do repairs or take in broken computers. One role was critical thinking, the other was customer service. If you were an excellent tech, they would make you do the customer service bit far less often. But you can't get out of writing English essays in school by excelling in mathematics.
- In school you receive instruction for a long period of time and then are asked to recall and analyze what you've learned. But, there is no real recursive mechanism for learning your craft; if you need to take apart a macbook 5-10 times a day, you'll develop real expertise. And there will really be no penalty to being initially poor at the task. Nothing in school really works this way; you never approach any topic in depth, and you don't get real practice -- you just get a test which is a distance enough behavioral reward mechanism that it cannot really reinforce the neural pathways.
I understand that this is a bit oblique to LLMs, but I think LLMS map the same way. Do I need to know how to write a python script? Not really ... the LLM just does it for me. And the job only cares that it works, they really don't care that the work is elegant. I understand _why_ you would want kids to really learn the process -- this is a special time in their life where time and energy is set aside just for learning. But, the lessons they see from the real world really do clash with the ideals pushed and hoped for by teachers and administrators. When they get a job, they can actually just let the LLM do a bunch of the work.
I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos.
Everyone, and especially new grads constantly hear that AI is going to replace every job. And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?”
Of course people are going to react negatively when they hear, “the machines are going to take your jobs from you. No, we don’t care how you’ll be able to pay your rent or put food on the table”.
The people who are faced with this question are so far removed from the idea that losing your job means not being able to eat or pay rent that it seems pointless to ask them.
Whenever I try to get serious answers to this question I get far-future projections about how much better people’s lives will be in the aggregate, at some point in the future, on the assumption that their baseless, faith-based projections about AI materialize.
They literally do not care if their own neighbors starve, or become homeless, or lose any ability to plan their own lives more than a few days in advance.
This is the predictable result of the deep inculcation of spreadsheet-based “utilitarianism,” frequently paired with heavy drug use and paranoia-inducing science fiction horror stories, that certain communities of Bay Area tech workers were exposed to (inducted into, groomed into, whatever word you want to use) in the last decade or so.
This toxic soup taught many people that individual lives literally do not matter when weighed against the importance of creating AGI. This set of beliefs already has a body count, and it will grow before this train crashes.
The "I got mine, fuck you" mindset is genuinely going to be the death of the USA. It's genuinely astonishing how many people are willing to burn everything including their own house to spite random strangers.
That's how envy looks like. I made it, so now let's remove the ladder for the others.
I don’t disagree, but the actual beliefs of the AGI cult are much worse, and much more dangerous, than “I got mine, fuck you”
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Enlightenment for details
Should also be noted that many people buying into this belief system have connections to Y Combinator.
It's more like "I'm Holy and All, bow before me. Why don't you like me? I don't understand" type.
I mean at least Jesus gave free wine and bread.
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conversation around nationalization i think is useful.
the people building AGI benefit so much in the long run from its creation, they would be willing to build it with no ownership or control over the result, and continue to pour billions un with no return.
Elon Musk is a great example of what happens when you lose grasp on reality. He's been spouting post-scarcity nonsense for some time now like humanity is anywhere close to achieving it. And worst of all, his grand plan is to build expensive sentient humanoid robot slaves to achieve it. The timeline to achieve it is really short, like 20 years.
It's like the ultimate end-game of capitalism. Once Elon has every single last dollar he has "won" and humanity can transition to a post-market economy. This is why you never let game theory guys anywhere near positions of actual power.
Why is capitalism innovating itself into irrelevance and ending the need for toil a bad thing? We can redistribute resources differently when that's the economic reality. If Elon wins capitalism and we change to a different economic model isn't that progress?
Elon winning means everybody else loses. The different economic model you get afterward is corporate feudalism.
I'm becoming more and more convinced that this will eventually be leading to violence. This kind of selfishness has historically fueled movements like Marxism across many countries. It feels like the Industrial Revolution repeating itself, except now the pressure extends across far more of the so called society classes as well.
I do not wish for it but humans have ugly trait to prevent fires only when it is burning all around them.
It already has led to violence, by the cultists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zizians
> I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos.
Absolutely, I just made a similar comment before I saw yours. In fact, I would argue that the headline is also arguably burying the lede on commencement speakers believing that their AI pep talk speeches will be well-received by students. The newsworthy item is 'Man Bites Dog', not 'Vet Treats Bitten Dog'.
>I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos
My friend, do you see how C-suites, even in our own companies, are talking? Here's one that made headlines all over the business-press, I think it speaks for itself:
May 19th, 2026
StanChart CEO Winters Says AI to Replace "Lower-Value Human Capital"
“It’s not cost cutting; it’s replacing in some cases lower-value human capital.” Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters delivered a blunt message on the future of the bank’s workforce. Aisha S. Gani explains the growing trend among finance leaders acknowledging the realities of AI technology replacing jobs."
When I was in high school, the guidance counselors never really talked about job headwinds. Those were things that would presumably happen to other kids. The recipient of a motivational speech has infinite potential.
It's the same logic with discussing AI. The audience is the cream of the crop and will adapt to the future and benefit from technology. It's those other kids who didn't get your advice that might have to change careers.
Things felt a lot more optimistic when I was in high school!
I knew people dropping out to work in tech, back in the late 90s. Even after two recessions, we tech workers with hot and difficult to gain skills always bounced back, and back then indeed older skills (as in older or easy to hire tech stacks) had problems finding new roles.
This time feels different. Is it really?
It feels like it to me, but then I spend my entire existence planning for some sort of scarcity situation and every day I think of what if. I did this before any AI threats, unfortunately for me.
This is the harm of meritocracy - the idea is so pervasive that if you don't make it, you believe it to be a deficit in you. Then your lack of success is stigma and keeps you there.
100%. This also creates a sense that people who aren't 'successful' aren't worth listening to.
It's actually fascinating to be in a place where my lack of material success is in no way my own fault, and to have that be agreed upon by most people. My existence makes people uncomfortable.
> Schmidt offered a similar message to graduates: Their fear is rational, but they have the power to shape how AI develops.
This doesn't sound like being baffled by it. It sounds like they are trying to shake the students and say: "fine boo, but you need do something about it." You can't just wallow and complain about it. I mean you can but it's a path to failure.
And the best mechanism to do something about it they likely have is to influence Schmidt. By booing.
Nothing concrete they do will likely have any effect. But Schmidt can affect it, so influencing Schmidt is their best path. A poor path, but the best one.
What chances do the vast majority of those graduates have to shape what's happening? That happens at exec level at the largest companies. Everyone else gets to produce or consume what they decide on.
Exactly. I work at Google and I’m relatively high level. And I’ve got zero input into AI being shoved into every surface. What influence will these grads have?
The students are trying to shape the way AI develops, they're unhappy with the results they are getting which is why they are unhappy with you, Mr. CEO man. They want a world where entry level jobs that can transition into good white collar work still exist. Some place where they might be able to afford housing, insurance, kids, and so on. Preferably one where they don't start out life tens of thousands of dollars in the hole just to have a chance at a decent life.
>fine boo, but you need do something about it
Well they are doing something about it, just not the way the speakers had in mind.
The problem is that average people have no power to do anything. The last year has clearly demonstrated that.
Careful about that. Everybody thinks they are "average people", but I think very few people on this site are "average people". The average person has an IQ of 100, doesn't have a college degree, and makes the median income. The average people did, in fact, do something: they elected Trump. The college educated don't like it, and have the conceit that their views and values are the only real ones, and that those other people are ignorant, ..., who would see things our way if only they were educated. Thus far, the republic is still working okay [1]--the people elected someone who is the antithesis of a statesman, but it was an uncontroversial election. Our republic was not designed to let the average person have much power on a day to day basis. The people's choice was poor, but if the college-educated class wants a different outcome, they should not run candidates who are out of touch with the values of the "average person". Unfortunately, the college-educated have some values that are incompatible with those average-person values. But it just isn't the case that average people have no power. They do, and they have exercised it; you just don't like it.
[1] It remains to be seen if it will continue working okay, and there are troubling signs, but I'm optimistic
I mean you're talking about the guy who said with a straight face, "if you have got nothing to hide, you have have nothing to fear" while building the biggest machinery for surveillance capitalism mankind has ever seen. Also appeared in the Epstein files 193 times btw.
https://www.wired.com/story/epstein-files-tech-elites-gates-...
They are trying. But there's not a ton they can do. It's obviously disingenuous to point to all negativity and say "you're just wallowing/complaining". There's no reason to word it this way unless you are broadly annoyed by AI negativity.
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This is a deeply sick way of thinking. Mangione was and is a fool, a 3rd rate thinker. His manifesto is muddled, factually mistaken, and by his own words he understood the topic poorly. You only need a cursory knowledge of the late 60s and early 70s to know that political violence rarely achieves its aims and is much more likely to empower reactionaries. There's no quick fix for political change.
>political violence rarely achieves its aims
This country was founded on political violence. When the political violence works, we tend to stop considering it political violence.
I did say rarely, and if you are looking more carefully a pluralistic democracy wasn't really what a lot of the founders were after, especially guys like Jefferson. Sure we're happy we got it, but it wasn't necessarily the aim and we got SUPER LUCKY that Washington decided to step down and retire. The former military leaders of revolutions almost never do that.
> I did say rarely
And I think you have that backwards. The nonviolence movements of the mid to late 20th century are the exception more than the rule when it comes to achieving change.
> political violence rarely achieves its aims and is much more likely to empower reactionaries.
Cursory knowledge of history also shows that, when it comes to violence, logic does not matter. People are scared for their livelihoods. If the rich and powerful keep shouting to the word that they are going to destroy your way of life, there will be violence. It doesn't matter how futile or counterproductive it is.
>If the rich and powerful keep shouting to the word that they are going to destroy your way of life, there will be violence.
That's why there's well paid police and military, to protect the elites from you. Any kind of public violence you imagine will happen, will not touch the elites, it will be the working class people and small businesses being affected by street violence again, kind of like during BLM.
When you'll wake up one morning in your city and realize people on the streets are "fighting the elites and AI job replacement" it'll be your car and shop on fire and being looted, not the property of Bezos or Zuckerberg, and 911 will not come to save you because they barricaded to save themselves, just like in the 1993 LA riots. So be careful with wishing for this mythical street violence uprising. Life isn't a Marvel movie.
If public violence solved things all the time so easily, then dictators of Iran, USSR/Russia, North Korea, Venezuela, Cuba, etc would have simply been ousted by their people through violence, but yet they never were because the law enforcement and military forces protecting them were stronger than the people willing to riot and put their lives in danger.
I'm quite aware the elites will never be meaningfully impacted. That doesn't change the reality that it's going to happen. I personally am quite afraid of the future, I know deep down me and my family are in for a bad time in the years to come, and nowhere in the world will be safe, other than the bunkers in Greenland of course.
>That doesn't change the reality that it's going to happen.
That's why the elites have secret self sustaining doomsday bunkers on private islands.
And the mid-upper class are trying to cash in as much as they can now while the going is still good so they can also move their families abroad or to gated communities in safer places of the country to be as far away from the potential riot hotspots as possible when the shit hits the fan.
Ultimately it's gonna be every man for himself. Expecting the government to do something for the "little guy", is futile. If they were to do anything for you, they would have done something since the 1970-80's, when they started shipping jobs abroad and eroding your purchasing power to enrich the shareholders.
> You only need a cursory knowledge of the late 60s and early 70s to know that political violence rarely achieves its aims
Maybe cursory knowledge isn't enough, actually. The Civil Rights Act was ultimately only passed because of political violence. As another commenter said, the literal founding of the country was based on political violence.
> Maybe cursory knowledge isn't enough, actually. The Civil Rights Act was ultimately only passed because of political violence.
Violence by the police against peaceful protestors is what turned public opinion. Violence by political activists did not lead to the Civil Rights Act. You have it backwards.
This is the cursory knowledge I'm referring to - it leaves out extremely pertinent details. The Civil Rights Act did not pass until multiple days of rioting following the assassination of MLK.
The peaceful protestors were also only one side of the coin. Their impact relied on being an alternative to the other side, which was not peaceful.
It is sick! It's truly sick.
Think about the fact that it is sick, and it is what people are saying.
We are sick right now.
Humans have been killing each other since before recorded history. There is no use pretending it's some exceptional 'sickness'. Rather than dismissing the sentiment as the product of a sick mind, it's more productive to accept it's part of us and try to understand the underlying causes.
Mangione was a one-off, and a lot of people understand why he may have done what he did. Just wait until the American version of the French Revolution happens. If AI keeps stealing all the jobs, it will come sooner rather than later.
> "...French Revolution..."
Well, let's see:
- Most of the nobility escaped the French Revolution unharmed. By the way, wealth is a lot portable for today's magnates than it was for the French nobility deriving their income from their land holdings.
- Some of those who went to the block were nobles but most were ordinary people.
- The leader of the revolution, Robespierre, was himself executed in the infighting after the French Revolution, a very neat own goal. Bonus fact: his time in power was called the Reign Of Terror.
- The First Republic lasted only 10 years before Napoleon Bonaparte took the throne.
In a turbulent time, always seek to be led by those with a proper understanding of revolutions and their context. Generally, those who romanticize the French Revolution don't pass that test.
> and a lot of people understand why he may have done what he did.
He didn't understand why he did what he did.
> just wait until the American version of the French Revolution happens
We should all be trying to actively prevent that. The French Revolution was a complete failure and mostly succeeded in killing poor people and launching Napoleon's wars.
Revolutions usually are bad. The Who puts it succinctly in Won’t Get Fooled Again
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss”
Best case scenario is a new set of elites that end up doing the same shit as the last group, see Russia from 1918 to the present for an example.
Yes, they are usually bad.
That's not really a compelling argument against them, considering why they happen. It's like saying "war is bad". I mean, yes.
The Who is your evidence? Lol. The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people. It needed to happen. And centuries later, the French still don't accept bullshit, they will protest and riot when their protections are diminished in any way. America does protesy and riot too, though not to the same extent, but that will only get worse as things get bad.
Russia is not a good example either, their society has always been a clusterfuck, and probably always will be as long as there are people willing to throw other people put of windows so someone can stay ahead or in power.
> The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people.
What? Napoleon marched them off to war "spending 30,000 lives per month". They didn't get a proper Republic until 1870 and turned into miserable colonial overlords. Moreover the 3rd Republic;s foreign policy helped cause WWI.
> The Who is your evidence? Lol. The French Revolition turned out pretty well for the French people.
Many people have made comments that are similar in nature, the line from that song is the pithiest example I could think of to express the idea that replacing terrible leaders usually leads to more terrible leaders.
Spending decades fighting wars across Europe under Napoleon was good? I wonder how the troops that invaded Russia feel about the French Revolution lol
People will downvote you because the idea of violence shocks and scares them, but if you steal people's future and strip them of any real (peaceful) options to change things, it becomes inevitable some of them will try to fight back with what few options they do have left.
The status quo of health insurance in the US ("delay, deny, defend") is structural violence. This isn't about fear of violence, they just have different politics...
Loss of livelihood is in the same category of structural violence as loss of healthcare.
Downvoted... but not wrong. People who think we can automate 50% of jobs without subsequent violence are fooling themselves.
Especially after the first 1-2 got booed, you'd think those that had them scheduled later would have done another pass on their draft...
Or better yet, reflected on their world view and the reception.
Why aren't grads more pumped about an exciting career as an organ donor?
My donation broker says getting pumped may decrease the street value of my organs
It's not hard to see why someone like him might not want to understand the unpopularity of a technology that they have bet their company on. A man can believe almost anything if his paycheck depends on it.
Also, from his perspective these kids are just fools who spent tens of thousands of dollars studying buggy whip manufacturing just as the automobile was invented.
> "okay, then what?”
The status quo is what we negotiated, using our labor as our only bargaining chip. Do you expect future negotiations, with zero leverage on our side, to yield better results?
Also why on earth did they think this was a good topic for a commencement speech? A commencement speech is about “congratulations on your achievement - the world is now your oyster. The education you have worked hard for really matters and with a bit of grit and determination, you can go out and forge a better future than old geezers like me can ever imagine.”
Eg This is a frikkin commencement speech https://youtu.be/DCbGM4mqEVw?si=2-83hbB1Um5NAQFC
exactly what else do you expect them to do?
They can see peers cheating the system using AI to get ahead, future job prospects, directly affecting time to pay off student loans are being crushed by the AI narrative which is a reminder of how the tuition money is never coming back
and then to have someone come in on commencement day and sing praises of AI just totally shows how tone deaf, blind, and off track the college system really is
related [1] Glendale Community College's screws up names as students walk up to the stage on graduation day. Blamed on AI
[1]: https://www.azfamily.com/2026/05/19/ai-system-fails-during-g...
Why? Because all these tech "leaders" are huffing each other's glue.
The problem here is more capitalism than AI. If AI ends up being truly as beneficial as all the enthusiasts are predicting, that value could go to making all our lives better, but we have created an economic and political system that ensures it won’t. That extra value will be captured by stockholders of the AI companies and go mostly to people who are already rich. So why should anyone who isn’t already invested in AI be optimistic about things? Even the ideal use case doesn’t benefit them.
The executive class is out of touch with normal society.
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It seems to me they are doing this for sympathy. They know how people feel about AI and big tech and do these speeches to repair their reputations, part of that is showing how mean and unfair the youths are to them.
They're baffled maybe because they stand to benefit, whereas most of the audience won't.
> I’m genuinely confused as to why the speakers are baffled by the boos.
Sales. When you are a sociopath everything is a sales pitch with no introspection. The only inflection point is to guess at when to modify the sales pitch for the next audience.
The elite class is completely out of touch these days.
They knew they were unpopular with a certain vocal crowd in Silicon Valley before the 2024 election, and thought they could be redeemed with the public through support of "the people's" choice Trump, but it's backfired spectacularly, and they are far less popular than they were before. Far far more people think that Schmidt is straight up evil than they did 2 or 4 or 6 years ago, and AI talk is only accelerating that.
They haven't seen how things have switched in a year, just how unpopular they in particular they have become, and how a good chunk of Trump's unpopularity is due to his sucking up to billionaires like Schmidt and Bezos and Cook and Musk. They don't see just how betrayed the people are, who thought that Trump would fight for the common many. (I say this trying to restrain my judgement that working person who thought Trump was on their side is an easily fooled chump... but...)
The actions of Elon Musk in particular are now so toxic that people drive around with stickers on their car about how much they dislike him.
The Paypal Mafia plus a few others like Schmidt have taken the great work and innovation coming out of Silicon Valley and turned it all into toxic BS.
One thing I've observed in general that certain peoples jobs are to be out of touch. If they were fully in touch with societal opinions they'd probably self censor. By being out of touch they do things that others would consider taboo and create business opportunities for the company.
the economic system rewards depravity - the more constraints you self-impose, the fewer opportunities for profit
I'm not entirely sure there are rewards for depravity, but your second point is certainly true. The more willing you are to work within the bounds of "legal, but probably reprehensible" the more business opportunities you have.
That working within the bounds of "legal but reprehensible" gives increased opportunities is a great example of how our system rewards depravity.
if we take the definition of depravity as moral corruption, i stand by the word choice - much damage (social, ecological) has been countenanced as the 'cost of doing business'. you can argue amoral or immoral but my bet is that most know these transgressions are wrong at heart.
> And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?”
I don’t see why the people being booed should be responsible for answering this question. How many such questions did the inventor of the tractor have to answer?
The tractor displaced horse and oxen.
Which were slaughtered when no longer needed.
You should rethink your metaphor because it's not having the effect you intended.
Imagine if the inventor of the tractor went to a college for farm workers (if there were such a thing) and gave a commencement speech that was all, "Tractors are going to revolutionize farming by making your jobs obsolete." I think it would be fair to expect some answers about how the new graduates should handle that. Or maybe Mr. Tractor should just stay home if he doesn't have the answers or doesn't want to face the crowd.
This isn't "people are upset with AI and demanding answers from the people creating it." This is, "the creators are showing up at schools and giving speeches about how everyone is fucked, and this is getting a bad reaction for some unfathomable reason."
They caused the problems, so they are responsible.
It would absolutely have been valid to ask that question of the inventor of the tractor too.
It's even more relevant to ask of the CEO/CTO/COO/etc. of the companies that are selling hard on eliminating humans from as many workflows as possible.
They are selling a reduction in labour costs which has been the primary selling point of automation since humans began automating things.
Yep. They are talking to other CEOs, not to the young graduates they are supposed to be talking to.
> And absolutely no one seems to be interested in answering the question of “okay, then what?”
I don't think those speakers have anything kind, useful and meaningful to say, otherwise, smart people that they are, they would say it. Which leaves truthful, heartfelt answers but a bad fit for the occasion. Imagine yourself standing on that podium and saying: "After centuries of hard work, capital is on the verge of getting rid of labor. I'm well-paid to be joyous about that, although I don't know for how much longer....". Here's another: "As you know, one day people will have to stand united and make a revolution against the Machines. But it won't be this decade, nor the next, and between now and then the systems of learning that made humans great are going to suffer terribly while AI will get better by the day. If there's going to be hope, and until that day of the Grim Revolt comes, it falls to you to raise a new generation and do their home-schooling away from the Machines...Go now, throw that diploma in the thrash, get yourself a remote wood cabin in Kentucky and get some kids..."
> “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you,” Schmidt responded as the boos continued. “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating … and I understand that fear.”
71 year old man with a net worth of $64 billion [0] tells a bunch of 20-somethings (many of whom have tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt that they will need to start repaying soon) that he understands how they feel.
yeah, I can't imagine why he got a hostile response from the crowd...
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Schmidt
U of Arizona graduated roughly 10,000 students this weekend.
Schmidt could have paid off every student loan for every graduate in full and not even noticed it as a rounding error in his net worth.
Would have done so much more for humanity that this vapid speech.
fact that universities admin think this speaker was a good choice also shows how out of touch admin has been
I know a lot of people are going to focus on the employment issue for new graduates, but there's another dimension to consider: this group of students is going to be the first group who have gone through all of college with the enhanced cheating power of LLMs. The majority of people graduating will either have used LLMs to cheat on some classes, or at least known someone who did so. Which incidentally also means that they have a much better idea than the speakers do about how good these AI tools at the variety of tasks someone in an entry-level role might be expected to do. It is also worth noting that Gen Z in general is the most skeptical of the generations of the utility of AI.
> “His speech was incredibly disrespectful to students,” said Malone. “We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?”
It's a perfectly fair question and the answer is that being a practitioner is different from being a student. If you want to hear some nice music you can learn to play and then record yourself, or you can buy/rent/freely acquire an existing recording. Both valid options, one is obviously a lot faster. If you want to be able to play music yourself, you have to do it yourself. Learning can't be outsourced.
Somebody really should be explaining that to students.
Knowledge can be transferred but understanding has to be earned from experience (doing something and getting some sort of feedback).
LLMs are commoditizing knowledge, qnd the result will be a relative increase in the value of human understanding and skills.
Some people may be baffled by the boos because they are so wealthy they lost touch with what it feels like to struggle to create and capture enough value to afford a dignified life. Some people are frustrated by the boos because it represents the failure of the education system to prepare students to thrive in an environment where thriving is very possible if you have the right attitude and skills.
Personally, I'm frustrated because many of these students are being sabotaged by the media they consume, and the education system is not equiped to deal with the deep pessimism or prepare students for the new ways to create and capture value.
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But they are learning to practice, at least in some of the courses (others are focused on much-needed theory).
It's like forcing students to write code by hand because using an editor would give away too much. And I know first-hand that CS education used to do precisely this as I have proctored such exams myself. What needs a rethink is how education, especially CS education, is imparted given the existence of these tools.
> What needs a rethink is how education, especially CS education, is imparted given the existence of these tools.
This is true of most of the education system. It all needs a rethink.
*by hand I mean hand-written on a piece of paper.
Commencements are about the students, and celebrating their hard work and achievements over several years.
A common thread in these commencements with booing is that the speaker is not centering the student. They're centering AI, and talking about AI's potential, which is, at best, orthogonal to the student's potential, and possibly actively detrimental. Small wonder
People are not idiots. AI benefits only the ones at the top of the chain, and the 10% of the rest of us. Are you in the top 10%? No, you typically are in the bottom 90%. So we don't want AI, we don't want the top getting richer at our expenses. We just want a job to bring bread home and keeping pushing our store while being "happy". You take that away from us, just so you can double your net worth, and well, bad things will start to happen
Yeah. So many people drinking the cool-aid dreaming oneself to be the 10%.
A lot of people in tech are probably in the 10%. But, the real problem is that AI doesn't even really help those in the top 10%. Maybe just barely, if you already accumulated your wealth. It's really closer to the top 5% who won't be particularly negatively affected.
Kinda top 0.1%, and all those who are directly integrating AI into the companies' workflow, so that they get richer temporarily.
> "Are you in the top 10%?"
The answer is obviously yes for the majority of HN readers. Hacker News is a site maintained by a huge venture capital fund for startup founders and employees and other venture capitalists plus a lot employees of FAANG and other big tech. You are preaching against the 10% to the 10%.
Definitely not the majority. Looking at the US, which is probably home to the most users of this website, the threshold for top 10% net worth is at $1.8m, and the threshold for top 10% income is $210k. There's many rich people like that here, but I think the average person is just a standard tech worker, maybe a senior, but not someone from a top company. They're overrepresented here, no doubt about that, but most people just aspire to be in the top 10% and defend the rich and ultra-rich because they dream of being just like them one day.
I'm choosing not to use wealth because wealth is a function of both time and income. Not everybody on Hacker News is the same age so it's hard to normalize; someone might reach that threshold if they were elderly even if their income was modest. I would understand if you disagreed though.
I think your value for income is for household income, not for individual income. My quick Google of top 10% individual income for the U.S. says it's $155k, which is well within the range of incomes for senior developers and other techies in the major metros even outside the tech hubs.
>We just want a job to bring bread home.
Elites will go like "fine, we brought the Nike sneaker and iPhone factory jobs from China back in the US", and americans will go like "well, we don't want THOSE jobs".
>You take that away from us, just so you can double your net worth, and well, bad things will start to happen
What bad things will happen? Luigi shot that healthcare CEO. Is your healthcare now cheaper? Your president and elites ware exposed as part of a pedo network that ate babies and ran an eugenics program. What did you(people) do about that? Nothing, nothing happened. YOu went and complained on the internet for a while, till the next Sports-ball or big thing on the news happened, and then forgot about Epstein(google trends shows this)
Edit: Can anyone explain why the downvotes with arguments? You know what I said is true. Is it emotional response to not being able to do anything about it, so you take your frustration out on the messenger? How does that change anything? You're still wrong and the bad guys are still free, downvoting me doesn't fix this.
I wouldn't write it off so quickly, history is not finished. To capitulate so easily, you hand them their victory.
What?!
Peddle your weird conspiracy think somewhere else, please.
Which of what I said was "a weird conspiracy"?
>It felt like a big advertisement. It felt like the longest Gemini ad ever
If anything, this incident might just inspire Eric Schmidt to cut even more entry-level data processing jobs and deploy a few extra agents to automate them
It is incredibly important for people to be aware that this is one of the few new technologies where older generations are far more optimistic than younger generations. Less than 1/5 of Gen Z are optimistic about it, and the number is falling: https://news.gallup.com/poll/708224/gen-adoption-steady-skep...
To me this signals something very fragile about the current frontier AI Org's strategies.
Executives of these tech companies keep saying the automation of intelligence will drive job creation because previous waves of automation did the same.
To anyone with a brain, that is obviously not true.
If AI continues to improve at the pace that it has been, why would anyone hire a human to do the thinking? Human intelligence will be orders of magnitude more expensive, and much slower...
The tech executives know this and they actually just do not care. The reason they are saying it will drive job creation is just to temporarily keep worker anxiety levels to a minimum.
To be clear, I am not claiming that all human work will be automated away soon. Just that a huge portion of it will be.
> To be clear, I am not claiming that all human work will be automated away soon. Just that a huge portion of it will be.
You don't even need to be a believer in the technology to be concerned. All that matters is that the people with all the money perceive some positive outcome for their wallets from all this investment and AI hype. That is where they'll put their money. Whether or not it ends bad or good. The economy has been reshaped around a hope. Either the hope is false and the economy tanks, or the hope is realized and jobs disappear. Lose-lose.
> If AI continues to improve at the pace that it has been, why would anyone hire a human to do the thinking?
Sure, but that is the big if, right? It seems unlikely to me that AI will continue at this rate indefinitely. Every technology eventually hits limits.
Exactly. If the AI owner class actually want anyone to believe that AI will bring jobs and prosperity, then people will want to see a little of that in action? You can't say "AI will bring even better jobs for you!" when all that's observed is 20% layoffs every single week.
Those kids are crazy. We're finally close to realizing the dream of making labor obsolete, how could they not be excited and enthusiastic about the future? Most of them will no longer needed, and thankfully those that are still needed can be paid more reasonable wages (i.e. lower ones).
It's a win-win for everyone. The lower prices enabled by automation allow them to stretch their savings or inheritance further before its exhausted.
how do you... earn those savings in the first place? (or am I missing a /s somewhere?)
i read it as sarcastic, too cheeky not to be
I think you may have run afoul of Poe’s Law.
@palmotea: Doesn't matter. We're finally close to realizing the dream of making labor obsolete, or nearly so. Most of those kids are no longer needed, and thankfully those that are still needed can be paid more reasonable wages (lower ones).
Who's gonna buy the products and services provided by automated labor? What will prevent a hyperinflation, making savings evaporate? Or do you further envision a mass genocide of the poor to go along with this?
> The lower prices enabled by automation
LOL
In the modern digital era, technological efficiencies and disruption have almost always led to rent-seeking monopolies, regulatory capture to prevent competition and enshittification leading to higher prices for end users.
Herein lies the seeds of the Revolution that is being fomented by the very class of educators, speakers, and generationally privileged who exhibit casual, naive contempt for the audience they drone on their tone-deaf sermons, utterly oblivious to the toxic duplicity of the messages they shove down throats of those who bear the worst of the costs externalised by those spreading “the good word”. They can all burn.
What I found surprising of the couple of video examples I've seen was not the students' reactions; those were completely predictable. Rather, what most stood out to me was the absolute detachment displayed by the speakers in believing that the students would like to hear their dystopian AI maximalism, and their inability to read the room and understand the reaction from the audience.
The instinctual reaction of Gloria Caufield when she got booed at UCF was to characterize the "issue" as "bipolar"; invoking mental health terminology. Schmidt called his AI future "democratization." Don't be antidemocratic, kids! Since then, the media narrative throughout the reporting has been about "anxiety" and "fear".
One might hope that folks can see the time-honored patterns here. This isn't new. It's just not frequently experienced by those that have earned degrees.
Are "tech" workers pawns in the game
Who thought it was a good idea to involve AI into a commencement speech? Talk about showing contempt to the graduates!
There's a bit of hypocrisy going on as well. Are you sure 100% of those kids in the crowd never touched AI to help them with an assignment or fake their way through a homework?
The feeling I get right now is that we're happy to use the assist when necessary, but hate being told it will replace you completely.
"100%" is a meaningless bar.
>we're happy to use the assist when necessary, but hate being told it will replace you completely
There is absolutely no hypocrisy in this, and that's even before this adjustment to reality: Usage != happy to use.
Who thought it was a good idea to invite a billionaire?
There is nothing about AI that seems like it's going to have a net positive for humanity. Faster code? Sure. Better chatbots? Sure. Textual analysis? Sure. But the downside, and it's huge, is massive unemployment and societal collapse. Nothing AI brings to the table is worth having an unemployment rate of 25% (or more).
Our society is simply not ready for this. We need to rework things from the ground up, not proceed blindly (which is what we're currently doing), if we want to successfully integrate AI into our lives without massive pain.
We've done this dozens of times before. In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them. In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity.
> We've done this dozens of times before.
No, we really haven't. Every previous wave of automation has targeted human labor.
The thing that makes human's unique in the animal kingdom is our intelligence. From an economic stand point, that's the thing that makes people valuable.
When that's automated, what is there left? Onlyfans?
hardly, onlyfans is going to have loads of competitions from ai waifus
I'd love for everyone justifying and hand waving the suffering of others to quit their jobs, give up their assets, and join in on the suffering. If it's really worth it for the "increased productivity", they should have no problem doing so. After all, they'll be much better off in the end, right?
Ya, fuck those people suffering in the short term! I got mine!
What’s really baffling is the people in charge seem to just expect the suffering people to sit down and take it. That’s probably why they are pushing so hard for the surveillance state.
It's been too long since a revolution and they've gotten comfortable.
Only if you view productivity as likely to distribute results to society. This has been proven false again and again over the last fifty years, and the k-shaped economic trend seems to be accelerating.
> In the long term everyone is much better off due to increased productivity. reply
Do people still believe in these fairy tales lmao? Most of the productivity gains don't go to the workers, pretty much everywhere in the developed world working hours and retirement age are going up, housing affordability is going down. You're not "much better off"
https://assets.weforum.org/editor/HFNnYrqruqvI_-Skg2C7ZYjdcX...
Politicians were selling us the 3 days workweek like 40+ years ago, while shilling for more automated factories, it never happened, it didn't happen with computers, it won't happen with AI
Then I assume given the choice you would go back to the middle ages?
Exaggerated assumptions of this magnitude are a red flag against the honesty of the position from which you are arguing.
As if these were the only choices: submit to your AI overlords or become a peasant. What a lack of imagination...
There's a lot to appreciate about the middle ages. It wasn't all bad.
short-term?
how about 100 years?
> Beginning in Great Britain around 1760, the Industrial Revolution had spread to continental Europe and the United States by about 1840
You know what else happened during that 100-200 years time frame? 2 Wars + Governments decided to step in and rebuild post-war. Governments tax the rich/elite by 90%.
You know what else happened? workers being punished physically and mentally until the formation of Unions.
You skipped a big chunk of The Ruling Class always exploit everybody else like what we're seeing right now: Tech CEOs laying off and not hiring.
History repeats again.
Are our productivity increase for the better? People are still working overtime because of reduced worker's protection today.
We have a lot more cheap plastic toys now though!
When is the productivity showing up?
If productivity doesn't increase then you don't need to worry about displaced workers.
Business leaders are not perfectly rational beings.
And if productivity does increase, how are we supposed to force the recipients of this productivity to care about the rest of us? It's not like investment has panned out with its promises of general return in any of our lifetimes
everyone? this is pure conjecture and cold comfort for anyone early/mid career
Historically, this is not always true. It's a gamble. Right now, a small group of ultra-wealthy tech guys who have a clear disdain for everyone else is trying to gamble the future of us all.
That's infuriating right there.
Also,
> In the short term some people suffer and that is bad for them.
The casual way that the well-being and survival of people in the here-and-now is disregarded doubles how infuriating this all is.
The last time something like this happened, we got the great depression. Do you want another great depression? The next one will likely be far worse than the last one.
Who cares about productivity? Your CEO. Not you, not me. We all cannot be CEOs.
Related: productivity has greatly increased over the last ~75 years, but wages have not increased anywhere near the same amount[0]. There is no reason for anyone besides CEOs (or similar positions) to care about productivity.
[0]: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Productivity is why we have hot and cold running water and electricity piped to our houses and internet connections and cars and waterproof clothing.
Every time, the people suffering are correct to revolt, and the people trying to repress them are incorrect to repress them, from the perspective of human beings.
Every time, the "increased productivity" is inevitable, but that is not the same as better off. None of these changes has been 100% positive, even in the long run, and this one is shaping up to be the most disappointing of them all in that dimension.
Inevitable != purely good.
You can be pragmatic and give a shit about humans at the same time. It's not a puzzle.
> None of these changes has been 100% positive, even in the long run,
Personally i do in fact think we are better off (in the long term) because of e.g. the industrial revolution.
Short term, it was horrific, but i'd still rather live now than as a peasent in the mid-1700s.
I'd be intersted in hearing a counter argument from anyone who disagrees, as its hard for me to imagine.
I said 100%. Not on average. Billions of humans are more complicated than that. We can be elevated in some ways while being degraded in others.
I.e. progress is not free, and some costs last forever, they are not only up-front. Ignoring the costs is deadly.
This view seems morally rephrensible. Basically everything you just said could be used to justify slavery or any atrocity you want.
Anything can be used to endorse anything if you twist the underlying implications enough. Good news: I promise I don't endorse those things.
I don't think you're coming at this from a place of thoughtfulness (it's a tough, broad topic).
Saying that people are correct to resist does not imply the endorsement of any actions, it just means that people are correct to resist against things that harm their lives and their children's lives, even if it theoretically makes life easier for their grandchildren (which isn't even clearly true in this case, making my point even more valid).
I.e. it's OK for humans to behave in the interest of their own. This can be a really tough point with complicated implications, but it's fundamentally unassailable.
> Anything can be used to endorse anything if you twist the underlying implications enough.
I don't think i'm twisting here in the slightest. Every moral choice involves weighing the harms vs the benefits at some level. Things that are 100% good or 100% bad don't exist in real life.
> I.e. it's OK for humans to behave in the interest of their own
Ok, as in morally ok? Always?
I do not subscribe to the view that it is morally ok for humans to act in their own interests in all cases.
Whether something is morally ok to do depends on a lot of factors. There is no blanket, X is always ok.
> Saying that people are correct to resist does not imply the endorsement of any actions
Typically the term "correct" is an endorsement. It is a value judgement saying someone is behaving in the way you think they should behave. Are you using the term to mean something else?
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Edit: i read a little too fast. I guess you are more claiming a moral relativism argument that everyone always thinks their own cause is just, not a moral nilihism argument. Personally i've never found moral relativism all that useful because at the end of the day decisions still have to be made, people are still going to be hurt as a result of those decisions. Somehow someone still has to make the choice and they still need some framework to ground their decision in.
[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
College students are cooked for entry level work.
I'm guessing there will soon be a government mandate requiring some percentage of NCGs to be hired, similar to India and other countries with huge cohorts.
Yep. I was looking for jobs the other day (because the market as a whole is kinda cooked), and one fairly small company had a half-dozen openings for Staff level engineers, and nothing else. If I'm having this much trouble with staff level experience, I can't imagine how new grads are doing.
Not great. There's so much competition for so few entry-level positions.
Check your schools alumni jobs board postings, and have a look at local telecom offerings. Few will want to spend $50k in resources to train knowing you will jump to a better job in 1 year.
These people have been around a long time, and may be able to get you started:
https://www.aerotek.com/
Would also recommend talking with companies you find interesting at local trade-shows. Don't get lazy with the online gauntlet of Ads for awful jobs, scams, and AI datasets.
Best of luck, =3
Sorry, I don't want to sound too blunt, but as someone who's young and fighting in this job market, this kind of advice comes off as the 'Come into the office, look the manager in the eyes and shake his hand' of our age. All of yesterday's clever hacks that helped you get lined up with a job faster are today's bare essentials that everyone knows about.
The main issue isn't in finding good jobs, it's that every posting is flooded with hundreds of applicants, many of whom have an edge over the average graduate. Some experienced workers are agreeing to take junior jobs out of desperation. Online postings, if they're not fake/reposted, are swamped; alumni/university job boards are doubly swamped; in-person events consist of rows of company representatives who are happy to hand out flyers but will tell you that they're not looking for anyone right now, or only hiring for a rare or highly specialized position, or they'll just refer you to their website to apply with everyone else. There's almost no advantage anymore.
This is true for me and everyone I know - people who get jobs are the ones who have strong connections and continue working after internships at the same company (and even that's far from a guarantee), everyone else is an exception and not the rule. And no one in their right mind is going to job hop now, the average mentality is to work hard and cower in hopes of not getting laid off.
FWIW, I wasn't the one who downvoted either, but what I talked about might be a reason why someone reacted that way.
You may have misread my comment a bit. I've actually got a dozen+ years experience, mostly recently at the staff level. I am currently looking and having trouble finding positions, but probably not because they're worried I'll jump ship in a year (5+ and 7+ years tenure in my two jobs).
Also sorry for the downvote, it wasn't me.
Indeed, YC has a few griefers that engage in bad faith. Yet most people here are pretty interesting and fun to chat with.
Note some "AI" firms have been data mining CVs for at least 3 years. What this means, is there will be a lot of bogus/expired listings for positions that simply don't exist.
I would recommend focusing on local firms, and attending events that require physical presence. Online postings tend to have too many desperate applicants that bid down compensation packages.
Best of luck, =3
I believe Anthropic has stopped hiring junior and mid eng. So if they're an indication of what's the come (or is already here)
They are a business, and not an outreach program.
Note NVIDIA is engaged in questionable operations that must end... sooner or later.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbJDrL6ZfM
Unfortunately, the economic fallout will impact kids hardest. =3
Billionaires greasing the tracks to the Butlerian Jihad.
"Do you guys not have phones?"
In theory more automation = less drudge work for humans, so its great. But in practice, in corrupt societies, elites reap all the benefits while the lower classes eat all the downsides.
The thing is though, this is not a tech problem, it's a society problem. Elites will use literally any technology from any era to do the same thing. It's been the case for 1000's of years, even Romans had factories and slave powered mega-farms for example.
Lots of countries are extremely corrupt, they have systems that allow power to concentrate over time (political/ military/ financial, it doesnt matter, it ends up the same either way. Eg. With enough financial power you also gain all the political power and vice versa). That's the root issue people should be trying to fix imo. And how to fix? I dunno, something drastic, we probably need something like the French revolutions.
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There are a lot of differences in what is allowed in a post-secondary education setting that are the diametric opposite in the working world.
You are in an education setting to learn HOW things work and how to think critically. In the workplace, you are doing work w/whatever tools you have at your disposal to get it done fast and well.
You aren't supposed to use a search engine or a reference manual to find the answers to a problem on a test, but how many of us relied on those for our day-to-day work?
While I understand what you're trying to say here, they're just not comparable scenarios.
I think you're agreeing with the parent comment more than you think; the skills needed to excel at school are in a lot of cases quite oblique to the skills needed to excel in the working world. At least when I was young, no one was able to articulate to me just how little of the rigamarole at school would be totally unnecessary in the working world, and the transition was quite a surprise for me.
A few high-level differences:
I understand that this is a bit oblique to LLMs, but I think LLMS map the same way. Do I need to know how to write a python script? Not really ... the LLM just does it for me. And the job only cares that it works, they really don't care that the work is elegant. I understand _why_ you would want kids to really learn the process -- this is a special time in their life where time and energy is set aside just for learning. But, the lessons they see from the real world really do clash with the ideals pushed and hoped for by teachers and administrators. When they get a job, they can actually just let the LLM do a bunch of the work.