So what is he supposed to say? "Ok let's stop developing AI so you can all have the exact job you trained for?" That hasn't been the case for decades.
When I left my eduction I could sequence 200 basepairs using gels. Now I process terabytes of NGS data on supercomputers. I dealt with it, I enjoyed it.
Edit: Not saying these kids have nothing to rage against, they can't afford houses, are uninsured, they face a huge wealth gap in the population, possible a war, the country is tearing apart... But why so anti AI specifically?
Because society is structured so that every time some labor-saving innovation comes along, it's used as a tool to drive down wages and reduce workers' bargaining power. And they leaders of these industries aren't exactly hiding it.
You might be able to game it in the short term, but It's not like anyone is seriously thinking this will reduce the totality of our efforts in the long term. Employers are already champing at the bit to reduce headcount and increase output targets.
The only hope these people have to offer in their bleak future is that if you play your cards right, you might be one of the few crabs to climb over the other crabs and escape the bucket before it's dumped into the kettle. It's giving "we need one person from each department to stay on and train the India team after the layoffs" vibes.
Yep. In theory, labor saving innovation (or handing jobs off overseas) should be a joyous occasional all. It could be a joyous occasion for all. But we have structured it so that, the moment it happens, 200% of the benefits go to capital and -100% go to labor -- and the consolation prize for labor is that maybe some of the 200% will trickle down into a different job later, or willingness to spend on overpriced haircuts, or something.
There's an argument to be made that this is a necessary component of an economy that can reinvent itself. Maybe. But even if we accept this convenient and self-serving and suspicious premise, there can then be no concession on the point that structuring it this way creates an obligation on the part of the person receiving 200% to "spread it around" and that attempts to dodge this obligation are morally repugnant, socially unacceptable, and ought to be met with harsh political backpressure.
For the last while, that hasn't been the thinking. Instead we have gone for "blame mexicans and let's see if we can't make it 300%!" The response of the kids gives me hope that people might be coming back to their senses on the matter.
There's an argument to be made that this is just part of a repeating cycle of history. Powerful people have always, will always, and are currently using their power to make themselves more powerful - no matter whether the power takes the form of nobility titles, currency, or company directorships. History consists of a continuous gradual increase in "top 1% wealth" punctuated by sharp decreases.
I agree, this is a reason to boo the (tech) elites. But they seem to boo genAI specifically, right? I'd understand it if they'd just started booing right from the first word.
A national average (which is what an inflation rate is) can only do so much. It's going to include people who spend very different amounts on housing, probably not much like the situation where you live.
No, the "averages smear out details" problem is completely separate to the core accusation I made and much less interesting. My accusation -- which you completely failed to address -- is that CPI systematically fails to account for forced substitution, introducing a systematic downwards bias that forces "real" incomes to rise over the long term as a direct result of the solvency constraint on individuals rather than improved access to goods and services in the economy.
Rent goes up more than pay. Solvency = the belt must tighten. You decide to eat chicken instead of beef because it isn't inflating as fast and it's good enough. The basket adjusts to model your "preference change." Inflation went down! Your real income went up! Wow amazing!
In the short term, basket adjustments are lagged and modest in impact, but in the long term they are everything. CPI is a good model of consumer price inflation vs last year but a terrible model when compounded. This is before going down the chained CPI and hedonic adjustment tangents, which both reliably adjust CPI in the wrong direction. Funny how all the dubious methodology points in one direction, that of understating inflation.
Worse, the very focus on consumer prices itself is highly misleading. Assets and liabilities matter in an economy that has a middle class and isn't just hand-to-mouth serfs. When assets inflate and paychecks don't and the response is dissaving and debt, that's a problem too. The American Dream isn't to Owner's Imputed Rent a house.
Innovation can make specific skills obsolete; but only if the output of the process actually gets cheaper or better...
It results in the output becoming available to people at a lower price point.
It's not some artificial social system like unions guilds or cartels, it's a tangible thing that actually produces more output with less (or different) workers.
If the tech CEO dream that they are selling that LLMs replace all white collar work within a few years who is going to have money to buy anything at the lower price point?
>so you can all have the exact job you trained for
Couldn't be any more ironic than being delivered at a graduation ceremony. An equal message could be:
"You know all that time, effort and money you just spent learning something over the last few years? It's useless now. Lamo. Congrats on wasting your life."
How to deal with it. Spitting "deal with it" at the audience just says he was so unprepared that he didn't even realize he was literally hired to give them that send-off guidance. But being skilled and notable in a field doesn't make people insightful.
I think maybe AI is just the last straw for many people. If capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production, AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely. Whether or not it can achieve that is secondary to the goal itself.
Grads are facing a brutal job market where much of what they just spent several years of their lives learning is going to have little to no value to employers. It's not like your gradual transition from sequencing with gels to using supercomputers over the long course of a career.
It's like you just spent 4 years learning to sequence with gels, and now someone is telling you that was a waste of time, and you should just stop complaining and deal with it.
But aren't we all going through this? I'm going through it, sadly I'm lacking the plasticity of a young mind!
I know I'm being privileged, but not by much, I'm self employed and the world is changing like crazy and it scares me as well, how will I gather my income in a year (luckily I do live in a "socialist" country, but not so socialist for entrepreneurs)? No idea, but I set up Open Claw and Claude Code and it's opening my eyes to different ways of doing things. The primitives to do this are the same as always (Linux). Sure, if you're doing medicine you won't know how to do this, but you never did, you relied on people like me/us.
Well, perhaps the only difference between me and the younglings is that over time I've come to trust my intellect. I'll deal with it, as they say.
Btw, if you're really suggesting that "this time it's different" (as in AI is different from electricity, the internet, ubiquitous computing), then you agree with the elites: you're going to have to deal with it, the genie is out of the box and it happened faster than ever.
I'll add again, they the younglings have many reason to boo the tech elites, and I'd join them if I were there, I'm just trying to understand what is exactly going on in the minds of our precious new generation, this is important (Hey, I watched Altered Carbon!).
I think it's simply the fact that there hasn't even been an opportunity for the youth to start, it's just misery right from the start. there's no "it'll get better" in that frame of mind
and I'm in a similar situation, although I'm younger
and I do think in a way this time is different, because AI by nature is very "generic", its not just one domain, rather everything is affected
plus there is a kind of mindset that the youth is entitled and that thank God we don't have to hire them anymore etc etc. it doesn't help.
and even though I believe things will get better, the question is "when" and if there will be a new "lost generation" or whatever.
maybe that makes sense? on one hand I'm able to do way more, but I also know what that means at least in the short term. I don't know where the demand will be to meet this new exponential supply.
You're right. Ali Alkhatib believes that AI is a political project intended to shift power and agency away from individuals and organizations and toward centralized power structures. Now, ordinary people must figure out a way forward, because they have fewer and fewer cards to play.
> AI represents the ultimate dream of the capitalist: the elimination of the need of human labor entirely
Decreasing human toil for the same level of production should be the dream of _everyone_. If it's only capitalists in favor then that's a massive indictment of the non-capitalists.
This reminds me of the famous Bastiat quote: "If, then, the utility of any branch of industry is to be estimated not by the amount of satisfactions it is fitted to procure us with a determinate amount of labour, but, on the contrary, by the amount of labour which it exacts in order to yield us a determinate amount of satisfactions, what we ought evidently to desire is, that each acre of land should yield less corn, and each grain of corn less nourishment…"
The misunderstanding that labor and not production is the basis of prosperity leads to some pretty silly conclusions.
So, if a slave owner who owns a plantation and has a bunch of enslaved workers gets a new fertilizer that increases production per acre by 200%, that is good for the slaves?
To your edit, it's because the commencement speakers are praising AI and probably not praising the Iran war, the wealth gap, or high housing prices. I would imagine if a commencement speaker did praise those things they would get boo-ed too.
Do you seriously think everybody is a programmer now that we have AI? Or that we don't need programmers anymore?
The tools are just changing. But everything is always changing.
Again: Sure they have much to boo about, but AI? Gen AI can run on your own machine even, you can fully own the means to your production. How is this wasting the time they spent studying? You still need knowledge and understanding of a field to be active in it. When the tools change your internal "world model" is not suddenly corrupt. I hope these kids were taught how to think, not what to think.
Kids fresh out of college with crippling student debt and no jobs should just buy increasingly expensive GPUs capable of running the best local models. Well done, problem solved.
To me it's a tool. It helps me accomplish my goals with less effort. That's the definition of a tool right? What is AI to you then? Perhaps I'm being dumb, but not sarcastic.
A large crop harvester is a tool, but if you used to work on a farm by hand it's not a tool you're going to get to use. It's a replacement for your labour and value, right? someone else will get to use the tool and earn money.
So the question is in what way ai is a tool to these kids.
The harvester is super expensive, using an LLM is not.
Who’s to say AI is not a democratizing force? Like the Internet? And book printing before that? Suddenly we all have a Personal Assistant, suddenly we can all build tools to make the computer do what we want.
Hey where is Stephen Fry with his podcasts when you need him!
So, the people who are saying "it's just a tool" are trying to imply that it's just like an electric drill vs a hand drill, and all that will happen is that people will switch to the better tool and get much more productive and that's it!
Any maybe that's where we are today, but AI is rapidly improving and while we don't know what's going to happen there's very clearly a real possibility that instead of just people doing the same jobs but with a better tool, that tool will actually completely replace their jobs. Maybe a significant fraction of the jobs in society. That's no mere tool.
The direct and unambiguous purpose of AI as a tool has been to replace labor and treat workers badly. This is not some doomsaying thing. This is literally what CEOs and billionares creating and pushing this shit have openly discussed and shared with reporters (who proceed to publish the quotes 100% uncritically and with no investigative sense of curiosity to ask further questions about it). They are excited at the idea that AI means they can cull millions and millions of jobs.
They can’t be so stupid to think that there is anyone left to extract value form when that happens.
Either we find something better to do than work for -or glue our eyeballs to the products off- our tech overlords or they go down with us. (I used that dash myself thank you).
Because the manager/owner/techbro class has decided we don't need employees for anything anymore, AI can do it all. This is phenomenally untrue, but that doesn't help you pay off your $400K of student loans or buy a house.
You are missing the point of why AI is being hated so much. Sequencing was just a tool for you that made your job easier. Right now it almost feels like CEOs can't wait to use AI to fire everyone
It helps that research assignments have a certain amount of people-power available, to which amplifiers increase the work done. Many businesses have a certain amount of work to be done, so amplifiers reduce the people needed.
That's not even accounting for AI's unique ability to trick CEOs.
Because people like Eric Schmidt are constantly talking about how AI is going to make the careers they just spent 6 figures learning to do obsolete.
How delusional do you have to be to give a pro-AI speech to the generation most likely to be directly fucked over by AI if your other predictions are true?
It's a college graduation speech, he's not required to touch on any specific topics.
"AI is going to upend your nascent adulthood and career" is pretty tone-deaf when delivered by a semi-retired billionaire who was was neck-deep in a conspiracy to reduce wages in his industry barely 20 years ago.
The thesis of cash is that governments and their influencers can turn some knobs and decrease its value and enrich themselves simultaneously by creating more of it. A lot of it as debt for the normals.
This is to Open Claw what Google home is to Home Assistant.
I prefer the Claw like I prefer Linux and FOSS in general.
Since day one Googs’ vision was to make the Star Trek computer. They’re really there now. But I don’t like their how. This computer serves them, not me. My mind-bicycle must serve me, my thoughts are my own. I hope my resistance is not futile.
Yeah, is that it? I really am curious. Aren’t the youngsters supposed to be enthusiastic about new tech? It must be ant establishment sentiments then. Don’t get me wrong I do love seeing the passion of youth united against big tech, or perhaps, loss of control. But I don’t understand it atm.
Sadly the question in the title is not answered (satisfactory).
So they really feel their futures are erased by a technology? Or by Big Tech? I'd say rage against the system (machine), not the tech. Sure captilism as we have it is rigged, money makes money, success depends on which family you're born into (this is even happening in the most socialist countries). It's far from fair. But to blame a specific technology? Meh.
I think you may need to read up a little more on the impact of AI, rather than just any 'specific technology'. They are being told that AI will remove their jobs. I too would boo loudly.
But they don't even have jobs yet, they are simply entering a fast changing world. I am a bioinformatician at the moment, when I left school I could sequence 200 basepairs by hand using gels. Now I use supercomputers to process terabytes of data. I didn't think of booing Illumina at the time.
I can't imagine they boo because the world is changing? Isn't that just exciting? I hope they were mostly taught how to think, and not just rigidly prepared for 1 single profession to be performed in a specific way? That hasn't worked for the last decades.
I can imagine them booing big tech (all your data are belong to us) and wealth differences though. They can't buy houses, they're not insured by default etc etc. There is much to boo about indeed. But AI? Meh.
I think it's the nature of the change that's really freaking them out. You left college and used a new tool to do things more efficiently. These kids are being told they won't be needed for any job at all. The AI will do the whole thing, the AI takes over their whole job. It's a subtle but important difference, I think.
I have a Iiyama with build in hub, at first it seemed ideal, just plug everything into the monitor. But my mouse glitches when used through the hub (MX Master 3S), the internet cable is only available to the active computer (so no tasks requiring internet can run on the other computer).
All in all, I just use the USB-C to HDMI switch functionality and couple the computers to keyboard/mouse via bluetooth, plus I bought a switch for the ethernet. It's a shame it's so suboptimal.
Another minor annoyance is that when I turn off one computer and want to switch to the other, the display turns off, taking about 5-10 sec to do so. Then I manually turn it back on and it's ready in another 3 sec. So I do this thing where I hover about the turn-off button, hit it and immediately switch so the monitor won't turn off.
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