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.”
