It has nothing to do with the Industrial Revolution. Put yourself in their shoes. They are fresh entrants to a job market and these companies seem hell-bent on making them useless in it.
Which was a legitimate criticism and took decades of fighting to resolve through organized labor, and protests. There was no 5 day work week or laws against child labor or wage requirements or against nearly any exploitation of employees at its advent.
If AI is like an Industrial Revolution which is yet unproven, but is being marketed as such, then you would expect exactly this reaction.
Believe me, I get it, I get how scary it is, for fresh grads, for people with not a lot of work experience, to be bombarded by this stream of AI-centric talk. Even discounting what the hype men will have you believe, this technology WILL have a huge effect on employemtn in an information services-heavy economy. Many of the grads probably used AI themselves a ton to write their papers, which ironically may have increased their fear of the technology rather than making them see it as a multiplier of their own skills, as they saw first-hand how effective it is at coming up with ideas they struggled to articulate themselves.
Also implicit in my response was the assumption that college grads don’t generally boo their commencement speakers. Perhaps I am wrong, perhaps that’s pretty routine. And yes, I agree these are just platitudes, that have gotten very tired - but isn’t that how most commencement speakers are? Platitudes, feel-good stories, motivational cliches, all coming from people who lucked their way to the top of some pile and thereby qualified to be invited to graduation? To go back to my earlier assumption - surely the vast majority of commencements don’t lead to booing, in spite of how disconnected and distanced most of the speakers probably are?
I am genuinely trying to understand the nature of the polarized reaction to AI. Just from the perspective of its value to me, I feel buoyed by it, and not worried that it’ll depress my personal value, my financial future, etc. And yes, again, believe me, I get it - I get that I have a lot of cushions and privileges that allow me to feel that way. I am by no means imagining everyone else is in the same position.
But I’m really fascinated at how much more negative the reaction to this technology is in the US, vs. elsewhere [1]. Are Americans somehow more perceptive and alive to AI's danger, than, say, the Germans and Indians that seem to be more willing to find something to be “excited" about, with this technology? Others commenting here have said that the speaker's message, that this technology has just made their college debt much harder to work off, is naturally off-putting. Okay, I confess, I guess I just don’t see LLM AIs as representing such a significantly more dangerous threat than so many other factors that have roiled the American economy over the last 2-3 decades. Offshoring, rising costs, stagnant wages, loss of labor power, inequalities compounded by a severely tiered educational system, constant cuts in public investments in social services - these have been secular trends since the 70s. Have commencement speakers been booed all these years, every time they spout some boilerplate language like, “globalization is the new reality, let's get prepared for it,” or, “Finding your own brand is essential to participating in the 21st century economy”?
I think part of the answer lies in this quote from the NYT article [2]: “Earlier in the speech, Caulfield [the speaker] had lost some of the crowd by praising wealthy corporate leaders, including Jeff Bezos. It didn’t go over well. [A fine arts Bachelor’s graduate that day said,] “Using Walt Disney instead of Bezos would have felt generic to me, yet still demonstrated she understood she was speaking to a crowd of artists.”
There’s an aspect here I think not of opposition to the technology per se but what it says about which large-scale social investments seem to matter to those in power. I think it’s somewhat amusing, and telling, that this person thought to reference Disney of all people - someone that by no stretch of the imagination could be described as a model of corporate responsibility or of support for labor - because in this view, Bezos is so diabolical, even Walt Disney, by virtue of his creative talent, is a benign example of corporate success.
What “Bezos” represents is the idea that the financial and political elites would rather gamble the economy on multi-trillion dollar bubbles, that aggressively extract even more natural resources from our shared commons, or send the privileged few to gaze at this planet from the “edges of space,” than figure out how to keep, say, the cost of insulin low. That’s what got booed, I think, more than the what “AI” represents.