Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt received a cold reception during a commencement address at the University of Arizona when he touched upon the thorny subject of Artificial Intelligence. The ex-Google exec was one of several commencement speakers across the United States this weekend (h/t NBC News) who were booed for their positive comments about AI, a technology that is having a vast and immediate impact on the job market that these graduates are soon to enter.
Schmidt, who served in various capacities as CEO, Chairman, and technical advisor to Google and its parent company Alphabet across several decades, found a mostly hostile reception to the themes within his keynote speech in Arizona. He talked about the impact of technology over the years on young people to the thousands of assembled students, with his fairly positive spin on AI proving to be a point of contention for the audience. Schmidt told the students that “we thought that we were adding stones to a cathedral of knowledge that humanity had been constructing for centuries, but the world we built turned out to be more complicated than we anticipated.”
Schmidt’s speech, which also mentioned how “the same tools that connect us also isolate us,” suggesting that they had “degraded the public square,” generally failed to enthuse the audience. Some of the loudest hostile voices were reserved for Schmidt’s comments on AI, however. “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts you could never accomplish on your own,” comparing it to a “seat on a rocket ship.” He also suggested that the students will be the ones to “shape artificial intelligence,” even if they “don’t care about science… because AI is gonna touch everything else as well.”
At one point, the former Google executive was forced to stop as the shouting intensified. “I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear,” going on to speak about the concerns within the next generation that their “future has already been written,” calling those fears “rational.” Schmidt’s message, however, doesn’t deviate: AI “will shape the world,” and it’ll be up to them to guide it along the way.
Schmidt’s get-on-board messaging clearly didn’t resonate with the audience at the University of Arizona. Other speakers, including Gloria Caulfield, a VP for a major property development company, suggested that AI was "the next industrial revolution" during her speech at the University of Central Florida, and was promptly jeered. Meanwhile, music executive Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University suggested AI was "rewriting production as we sit here" and told his audience to "deal with it" as they jeered him in response.
Meanwhile, Google is just one of several influential technology firms involved in the development of AI, spending billions on its development. Nobody quite knows what the future has in store for an AI-dominated world, but an exec at tech rival Microsoft believes AI will replace every white-collar job within the next 12 to 18 months, despite a wider survey of U.S. business executives from earlier in the year reporting little productivity gains from its use so far.
