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.
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.
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".