Then something unexpected happened. Students began to boo.
This was expected by everyone, I recall Eric Schmidt himself talking about how disappointed he was that students were booing but he would turn the students around at his speech.
From there the article roughly seems to be roughly dismissive of the students and pretty bullish about AI anyway. Real Skinner “no, it’s the children who are wrong” energy wrapped up in way too many words.
The vision: “Listen up you ungrateful insect. You’ll work for nothing, under constant surveillance, until you die early, penniless and in pain, from very preventable conditions. Also, we’re just going to fire you randomly. Fuck you”
Don’t forget the 60 hour work week
Because they are graduating into a empty job market
Because young people are the ones on whom the burden of actual work always falls, so they can see that it doesn’t fucking work
The article author doesn’t understand what Silicon Valley’s actual vision for the future is, but the students do.
Because it silicon Valley is full of nazi pedos
That’s not true.
Some of them are libertarian pedos.
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Everyone is rejecting Silicon Valley’s vision of the future.
The deer in the headlights thing with the kids today is real. It’s like the way they were raised - in that every move had to be “safe” and “right” - has short circuited the ability ot just leap at a problem, and tackle it.
I am the tech/maintenance/art director of a handful of small shops and work with the kids that are coming out of their first or second years of college (the “summer butterflies”, I call them) and I am constantly telling them that in the workplace situation, to not be afraid or hesitate to act on something.
There’s a lot of self doubt and not trusting their own gut instincts. (which often are correct) If the action isn’t right, that is less an issue than letting the problem fester.
For me, it’s about getting the kids to use their smarts - which they DO have - and in the framework of a situation where the answer isn’t found with AI, they know more than they believe.
It’s not just the pivot to AI, there’s also some cultural/political hangover tied to “getting it wrong” that cripples their ability to move. Yes, I remember going through the SAME thing, with the lack of confidence in my late-teens and through my 20’s, but the difference was, I did not hesitate to tackle a problem.
Screwed up plenty. Sorted the problems perfectly more often. The willingness to jump is what I always try to encourage.
I’d love to see these kids turn AI into the tool that they want it to be.
Wow, a “kids these days are just lame” sentiment, which is as tired and old as we have been writing it down. Every single generation have broadly had no self-awareness and recalled their coming of age with rose-colored glasses. They were plucky, hard working, courageous, but kids these days seem to never share those same traits.
I’d love to see these kids turn AI into the tool that they want it to be.
The challenge is the consolidation of the power, they can’t realistically expect to actually shape how it will be used, but they have plenty of material and evidence of who actually does get to shape it and how it’s going to go. The biggest sociopathic, out of touch jerks are the ones cheering the hardest, and that is a very bad sign. They are cheering about software without developers, music without musicians, art without artists, and so on. They offer no appreciation for the people graduating at their own graduation and instead see it as a platform to talk up AI instead. It’s a gigantic “fuck you” to the graduates to leverage their commencement in such a way.
We have AI companies running ads about how someone was going to do comp sci, but since that can’t work out, they are going to do dance. Which we are to take as inspirational, but the practical reality to this scenario is no livelihood available. No vision for livelihoods, just elimination of opportunity. Plus they actually have used the damn stuff, they know the disconnect between promise and reality, but they are still stuck competing with it, which is also insulting as folks have no more confidence in grads than generative AI.
We have comments like this, making it plainly clear exactly what sort of structure they have in mind, from Larry Ellison: “Citizens will be on their best behavior, because we’re constantly recording and reporting everything that is going on."
Note he didn’t say “our best behavior”, it is “their best behavior”. He isn’t included, he isn’t a part of it. The rabble are to be managed and he is to continue to enjoy being “One Rich Asshole Called Larry Ellison”.
Every single generation have broadly had no self-awareness and recalled their coming of age with rose-colored glasses.
Ahhhh. No. I wish. My coming of age was sheer terror and a surreal nightmare that forced me to abandon any notion of higher education and jump into a job at a shoe factory at 17 and leave home or face years more abuse from the adults involved. I learned that motion no matter what kind or in which direction was preferable - and safer - than standing still. That was survival and there was no rose colored anything.
I could go into a similar tack with the assumption that everyone is middle-class and comes from a stable, safe home… God knows that’s something I can only imagine, but I can advocate for action - regardless of the upbringing of the kids. It’s not about anything but maintaining motion in one’s life.
The “fuck you” to the college students from these tech dipshits is predictable.
It’s the same “fuck you” that put the working class to pasture when the country’s factory jobs were offshored. I watched mine go to Korea at 21.
If the kids can leverage AI to undermine the dipshits, they could start with the phrase “monkeywrenching” and see where it goes from there.
That would be… interesting.
and I am constantly telling them that in the workplace situation, to not be afraid or hesitate to act on something.
This really depends on the workplace. I’m at a megacorp and trying to fix anything is far more pain and work that just not.
Like I could try to convince them to move off of python3.9 because that’s old and well past end of life. But I need to explain that to my boss, the business lady, some other manager, “the audit team” (whoever the fuck they are), and then grapple with how they have 5-10 years of code and not a single line of automated test coverage.
There’s no reward.
I just don’t see megacorps hiring people anymore. I mean is that really a career path like it used to be?
That’s kind of like “no one goes there anymore - it’s too crowded”
I mean, the one I’m at is mostly doing a hiring freeze. Management is frothing at the mouth over using AI. But there are currently a lot of people working here, some full time and some under dubious “contractor” arrangements.
No child left behind really messed up education…
No child get ahead was more like it…
Because everyone else is too but they have the highest stakes and the least agency so the lazy option is to blame them.
