Especially the folks who are graduating. All they can see is 'Juniors no longer wanted' and 'Seniors also can count their days' everywhere.

Why can't they be as excited as people already invested into Datacenters? /s

> It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.

Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.

He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"

And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.

No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".

It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.

Eric Schmidt also raped a woman forty years younger than him, the students were objecting to that as much as the AI. Maybe don't schedule public speaking events after being accused of rape if you don't want to get booed.

It isn’t every day that Big Tech execs get to hear the truth of everyperson sentiment.

The only ones that need to hear the truth are the speakers not realizing they are first to go in civil uprising over mass unemployment

I wouldn't be surprised if AI is also influencing how people talk/write. I felt like I used it is not x it is y a couple of times recently and not sure whether I am just being more aware of it or if it is becoming a part of my own writing pattern because of LLMs.

Come in without a login / cookies. It's like 60-70% AI now. It's crazy!

Not actually what this is about (but I was hoping it was because that'd be hilarious).

In my 20+ years of career it has definitely felt the most tyrannical rollout of a technology I ever experienced.

Every other world-transforming technology I got in contact with was more organic: the personal computer, the internet, high-speed internet, the smartphone, all of those followed the usual adoption curve. Even technical tools like cloud computing which carried a bit of the anxiety from execs about "being left behind" was much more organic.

AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.

I sincerely cannot wait until this phase of it bursts, I want to see what's on the other side because right now this side kinda sucks even though I have uses for the technology itself.

I think the tech downward spiral is described quite well by the way we went from a historical Steve Jobs commencement address at Stanford to this.

>warning people about the massive increase in misinformation/disinformation

Such a boring take. Misinformation is easy to disprove, problem is commentary that is neither correct or wrong but holds certain biases. It is also very easy to convince yourself you are "thinking critically", but people can often believe something due to their emotions and only try and apply logic to that belief after. It is like coming up with an answer and then working backwards, rather than starting from first principles.

When you work towards a belief it is easy to mistake noise for signal.

“Hateful woke culture”? You know the “woke” people are on to something when their critics project their own flaws back onto “woke culture” as a means to delegitimize it.

“Woke” is a reaction to hateful culture.

“Hateful woke” is the modern “reverse racism”.

I'm sorry, can you explain what the link with "woke" is in this video?

I agree with your premise, but let's not pretend we did a good job equitably distributing the benefits of the industrial revolution

Turns out the industrial revolution doomed us for short term luxury in the grand scheme of things.

This post is delusional. There nothing liberating about generative AI and folks aren't investing hundreds of billions because they think it will liberate people.

> They shouldn't boo the amazing technology, but instead cheer for this liberation from toil

Come on, we're all adults and well-aware that if companies find a way to make people more productive, it just means they'll expect more, not that we'll get more free-time.

Not everyone characterizes AI as "liberation from toil," and many are skeptical that any "equitable distribution of benefits" will occur in the first place. That's the point.

> cheer for this liberation from toil and find ways to equitably distribute its benefits

Why would you think that will happen? You seem aware of, for instance, the Industrial Revolution and what it has ultimately resulted in.

In France and Russia there also had been revolutions. They have found a way to distribute.

> You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up

Watch them :)

Seriously though, this happens every time technology is introduced, for better or worse.

And while it's annoying, it's actually very helpful too, but you need to get further into your understanding than the emotion arguments people usually have front and center in their mind, because there is real criticism that has real value in there, it's just behind all the annoying knee-jerk reactions.

But again, this happens over and over, every time, seemingly in every community. Even HN has these soft spots, maybe not for AI but for example blockchain and cryptocurrencies are still subjects that somehow bring out these knee-jerk reactions to people (again, sometimes for good reasons, although the initial reaction masks the real cause).

Best we can do is listen and actually understand, instead of just brushing it away as "irrational hatred", because it always comes from somewhere, sometimes personal reasons, sometimes illogical reasons, but always because of something.

Everybody pays the price for AI, but relatively few benefit.

Power is more expensive because data centres are using so much of it. Climate change is a tougher problem to solve because we're trying to reduce emissions while the energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations. GHG emissions are going up when they need to go down. Computer hardware prices are through the roof. Fresh graduates, including those in STEM, face uncertainty in a job market that's trying to replace inexperienced, unspecialized, non-experts (i.e. them) with AI. Many of them know how to use AI just fine, but that doesn't necessarily make them employable. You may dream of being a AI-powered super-developer, but the path to that job may go through entry level positions that become harder to find each day.

Critics of AI are not being irrational. They're paying the costs but not reaping the benefits and they don't see a clear path to changing that. I suggest you look into the history of the luddites and the industrial revolution. Today, we see the industrial revolution as a tremendous boon, but it wasn't that for everyone initially. Multitudes spent their entire lives being shafted before the benefits started tricking down. The real kicker is that only some of the people who suffered were luddites. Many were just like you. You can love a fission bomb for the beauty of its physics, but you'll suffer exactly the same fate as an nuclear abolitionist if one is dropped over your city.

> particularly those not in STEM/engineering fields - have an almost irrational hatred of AI. It's to the point where they'll mock you for using it, even when it provides such an insane productivity boost.

What "insane productivity boosts" are non-coding fields seeing from AI? If anything, coding is the most affected space, and even there I'm not sure I'd classify it as an "insane" productivity boost yet.

I use AI a lot for development, but I am not sure why students should "embrace" the new technology made to take the job they are studying for.

Maybe they see it eradicating their job prospects and being used to cheat and invalidate their hard studying by others who want an insane productivity boost? That’s not fair to them if others are cheating and they’re learning properly.

I find my hatred of AI to be incredibly rational, and the cultlike veneration of the “insane productivity boost” it gives you to be truly irrational (whether or not that boost actually exists).

Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.

You do realize luddites were people made unemployable and impoverished by new technology? Calling them luddites just proves their point.

i think 'shake things up' is a doing a lot of work to minimize the impact this tool will have for this demographic in particular. especially for non-STEM college students, so in theory students who read/write a lot and therefore are probably sick of reading a lot of mid-tier, averaging slop.