Ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt Fails to Read Room on AI, Gets Booed into Oblivion

Source Domain: gizmodo.com

Here’s a rare news event that hasn’t occurred in, gosh, a week: a university commencement speech was greeted with hostility because the speaker praised AI.

404 Media got the footage:

In fairness, the speaker, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was at least trying to thread the needle, vaguely empathizing with students. “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create,” he said.

But, as in the case of real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, whose pro-AI speech one week ago triggered an almost identical reaction, it’s easy to see how Schmidt’s words could be perceived as arrogant to a crowd that had heard the AI-inevitability message before a million times. He can be heard telling the crowd of young people they will “help shape artificial intelligence” and that, “If you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is gonna touch everything else as well.”

In perhaps his most ill-advised moment in the 404 Media footage, Schmidt says:

“You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”

I suspect the crowd was probably already picturing itself relegated to steerage on the great “rocket ship” of AI, but Schmidt spelled it out anyway.

Premeditated booing of controversial speakers is common, and tends not to be all that newsworthy. In fact, that also happened last week to noted anti-cancel-culture guy Jonathan Haidt when he spoke at NYU. Judging from the theme of his speech—basically, young people aren’t fragile snowflakes—a low-energy hum of disapproval seems to have been baked into his plan.

But it’s worth paying attention when a speaker’s…

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