Commencement address season hasn’t been going well — for the commencement speakers.
I’m sure you’ve seen the videos on social media. The big shots who have been brought in to inspire a next generation of graduates have used their speeches as opportunities to extol the limitless possibilities that artificial intelligence will bring. They’re speaking to graduates who are entering a shaky job market and are already burdened by tens of thousands of dollars of student debt. However, companies of all stripes are using A.I. as an excuse to slow entry-level hiring and lay off workers. Tech executives have been warning (though it sometimes seems as if they are bragging) that their technologies will be job destroyers.
Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive who spoke at the University of Central Florida’s College of Arts and Humanities, told graduates that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” Scott Borchetta, the chief executive of the record label Big Machine, told the graduates of Middle Tennessee State University that “A.I. is rewriting production as we sit here.” In each case, the students expressed their displeasure at the speakers’ blatant A.I. boosterism the best way they could: with loud boos.
When Eric Schmidt, a former chief executive of Google, told graduates at the University of Arizona about their A.I.-shaped future, the shouting got so intense that he paused and said that graduates feared “that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.” Mr. Schmidt told them to make the best of it. “The question is not whether A.I. will shape the world. It will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.”
Mr. Schmidt’s solution to world-upending technological change is … what? To pull yourself up by your bootstraps? His approach is peak billionaire brain, directed at the young people who have, for the better part of a decade, been treated as woke, lazy, avocado-toast-eating snowflakes. All these speakers just don’t get it. The problem isn’t woke; the problem is work. It’s a lack of social mobility. It’s that college may no longer elevate a graduate to the middle class. It’s that nobody even bothers to pretend that a house, a good job and the ability to start a family are at all guaranteed.
Think of this from the graduates’ perspective: Wealthy old people telling you your future is being pulped by acres and acres of electricity-sucking, water-guzzling data centers feels dystopian because it is. Companies are trying to automate your future away. No wonder you’re furious.
Young people are facing what M.I.T. Technology Review calls a “looming crisis in entry-level work,” and college, once assumed to be a prerequisite for a secure job, no longer feels worth it. The general gestalt coming from a certain sliver of affluent Americans is that college graduates are more liberal trouble than they’re worth and perhaps could be replaced by bots. Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and G.O.P. megadonor, mused to Joe Rogan that a bot “never gets drunk, never gets sick, never gets high” and “never files H.R. complaints.” (It never boos a smug commencement speaker, either.)
According to a recent working paper from researchers at Harvard, hiring for entry-level roles at companies that have adopted generative A.I. has dropped each quarter since 2023. What is not clear is whether A.I. is taking people’s jobs or if companies are using A.I. as an excuse for not hiring. Either way, A.I. is not exactly popular with people entering the work force for the first time.
I’ve spent the past six months obsessing about giving a commencement address to Bennington College, where I earned my M.F.A. It’s a truly bizarre moment to speak at a college, in light of the way technology is changing the work force so rapidly and the way the White House has waged war on colleges, professors and education writ large. Even in the best of times, commencement speeches are uncomfortable: The kids you’re speaking to are basically hostages; they can’t leave without their diplomas.
When I finally gave my speech on Saturday, I didn’t talk about A.I. with the Bennington graduates. I talked about the role their magical little college played in my life. Getting a master’s saved me; it gave me a bit of a foundation, perhaps a little authority in a world where I often felt like an impostor. I told the kids the truth: that I would love to give them advice about how to avoid the messiness of one’s 20s, but the messiness is the point. “That eyebrow pierce will leave a scar,” I said. “You’ll have trouble getting the barbell out and eventually someone will have to use tiny pliers to cut it out of your face.”
