Commencement is back. And the vibe? Terrible. Specifically when speakers try to convince fresh grads that artificial intelligence is their bright, shiny future. It isn’t landing. Not at all.
Last week Gloria Caulfield from Tavistock Development took the stage at UCF. She framed the current era as “profound change,” both “exciting” and “daunting.” Fine. Then she called the rise of AI “the next industrial revolution.”
Booing. Instantly. It grew louder, turning into a wall of noise. Caulfield chuckled. Asked the other speakers “What happened?”
She realized it. “Okay I struck a chord.”
She tried to continue. Said that just a few years ago AI wasn’t part of our lives. The crowd erupted again. This time in cheers and applause at the mention of its absence.
Eric Schmidt got it too. The former Google CEO spoke at the University of Arizona. The pushback started before he even walked on stage. Student groups demanded his removal following a sexual assault lawsuit from a former business partner. He denies the allegations.
The booing began before the microphone was handed to him.
But the noise spiked when he said, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” Schmidt shouted over the jeers. Told them to assemble AI agents to handle tasks they could never do alone. His metaphor? Get on the rocket ship. Don’t ask for the window seat.
Did they get on the ship? No. They booed him down.
Is it universal? No. Jensen Huang spoke at Carnegie Mellon recently. Called AI the reinvention of computing. Silence. Or at least no audible revolt. Nvidia remains popular it seems.
Why the hostility everywhere else? Maybe the Gallup poll tells the story. Only 43% of 15- to 34-year-olds think it’s a good time to find local jobs. Down from 75% in journalist Brian Merchant put it bluntly. To many students AI isn’t progress. It’s the “cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalist” efficiency.
Imagine being twenty-two. Unemployed. Told your future involves prompting large language models. You would boo too. Probably loudly.
“I too would loudly boo at the prospect…”
Resilience was the safer word. The one that didn’t trigger immediate riots. Schmidt admitted his audience feels the future is already written. Jobs are evaporating. The climate is breaking. Politics are fractured. They are inheriting a mess they didn’t make.
Caulfield made a different error. She misread the room entirely. These were arts and humanities grads. She lost them with generic praise of Jeff Bezos long before the AI comments.
Speakers still try. They insist technology will save us. They tell us to get on the rocket.
But nobody asked to board.
