But this luddite-like hatred needs also to be addressed. You can't turn your back on a helpful new technology just because it shakes things up. Students need to learn to use it more than constantly boo and ignore it. Especially those in non-STEM fields, where its usage might be more optional currently.
Watch them :)
Seriously though, this happens every time technology is introduced, for better or worse.
And while it's annoying, it's actually very helpful too, but you need to get further into your understanding than the emotion arguments people usually have front and center in their mind, because there is real criticism that has real value in there, it's just behind all the annoying knee-jerk reactions.
But again, this happens over and over, every time, seemingly in every community. Even HN has these soft spots, maybe not for AI but for example blockchain and cryptocurrencies are still subjects that somehow bring out these knee-jerk reactions to people (again, sometimes for good reasons, although the initial reaction masks the real cause).
Best we can do is listen and actually understand, instead of just brushing it away as "irrational hatred", because it always comes from somewhere, sometimes personal reasons, sometimes illogical reasons, but always because of something.
Power is more expensive because data centres are using so much of it. Climate change is a tougher problem to solve because we're trying to reduce emissions while the energy requirements of big AI companies is eclipsing that of some nations. GHG emissions are going up when they need to go down. Computer hardware prices are through the roof. Fresh graduates, including those in STEM, face uncertainty in a job market that's trying to replace inexperienced, unspecialized, non-experts (i.e. them) with AI. Many of them know how to use AI just fine, but that doesn't necessarily make them employable. You may dream of being a AI-powered super-developer, but the path to that job may go through entry level positions that become harder to find each day.
Critics of AI are not being irrational. They're paying the costs but not reaping the benefits and they don't see a clear path to changing that. I suggest you look into the history of the luddites and the industrial revolution. Today, we see the industrial revolution as a tremendous boon, but it wasn't that for everyone initially. Multitudes spent their entire lives being shafted before the benefits started tricking down. The real kicker is that only some of the people who suffered were luddites. Many were just like you. You can love a fission bomb for the beauty of its physics, but you'll suffer exactly the same fate as an nuclear abolitionist if one is dropped over your city.
I've heard so many different takes on this. Where did you get this information?
What "insane productivity boosts" are non-coding fields seeing from AI? If anything, coding is the most affected space, and even there I'm not sure I'd classify it as an "insane" productivity boost yet.
Productivity as the be-all-and-end-all of personal aspiration exemplifies what is rotten in our industry and society at large: more for the sake of more, faster for the sake of better, no matter the consequences and with certainty no mind for the quality.
Every new technology brings with it much promise, MUCH bigger hype, grave disappointment once the people who have been using it wrong fail, and then the new batch of winners. This happens any time there's a big leap in our tools, and AI is no exception.
Productivity is how we make things better. We have enough food for everyone because we've leveraged new tools to make the task more productive (the fact that the food is unevenly distributed is a separate problem).
It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.
He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"
And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.
No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".
It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.
If somebody visits a flat earther conference and says "you all need to accept the fact that the earth is not flat!" ... then this certainly doesn't prove that the earth is flat. I think you trip over your choice of words. If s/b in general has to go around saying that then your reasoning makes some sense. But if s/b in particular (like Schmidt) has to go around saying sth then this only proves that this particular person has some personal intention or feeling s/he wants to express. I couldn't care less why someone like Schmidt feels like that but I have my ideas. Maybe he just identifies with AI financially and ideologically and likes to provoke.
There was a time in which they deserved some respect, as a result of free exchange of ideas among intellectuals. That's far behind by now.
Why would you think that will happen? You seem aware of, for instance, the Industrial Revolution and what it has ultimately resulted in.
Come on, we're all adults and well-aware that if companies find a way to make people more productive, it just means they'll expect more, not that we'll get more free-time.
devaluation of expertise,
College students working hard to gain expertise in specific areas are faced with the prospect that this very expertise is being "democratized" by AI, putting it in the hands of literally anyone. Sure, true expertise is still needed to "validate" (and train) the AI, etc, etc, but that's a small consolation.
Relatedly, a year ago I was excited to learn the Rust language. Now I don't see the point (And I'm building tools with Rust). I'm sure this sentiment extends across fields.
In science for example, anyone can do an experiment about gravity. In fact millions of high school kids do every year. What makes an expert scientist is the ability to understand all the many ways such experiments can fail to accurately measure the underlying reality.
Or consider an AI writing a press release. A PR expert will catch nuances of wording that will confuse readers, or leave fodder for others to attack or mischaracterize the announcement.
College students know this because they are working with AI. And what makes them mad is the human-driven false notion that AI devalues expertise. AI looks like magic to non-experts. But it’s not, it’s more like a “junior engineer” or “PR intern” to people with actual expertise to evaluate its output.
Facts don't matter, only what the person making the hiring decision believes to be true, or has been fed.
College grads are angry because their job prospects are bad due to AI hysteria. It has nothing to do with how good AI is, the hysteria is what is causing problems.
This can be really frustrating for someone who spent time getting experienced. They get hit twice. First they don't get a chance to do a job because "AI replaced you, sorry". Then they look at the result and what they see is low quality slop.
I'm in a very similar boat! I've had rust on my to-do list for a very long time, but never found the bandwidth in the personal life to actually dig in enough to get proficient. Since AI has come around, I've been able to write a lot of tools in rust and just learn little pieces as I need to. My first couple results were not very great as I didn't know what I was doing, but I've learned enough about structuring good rust apps from the experimentations that I can crank out something pretty decent now.
The AI is so good at holding my hand that it has fundamentally changed how I approach unknown languages and stacks. I used to pick the best stack that I was proficient with for the job. Now I pick the best stack for the job, and become proficient in it. Pretty wild times we live in.
From reading your comment, I suspect you are not becoming as proficient as you might think.
College provides knowledge but never provided expertise. That comes from experience in the real world. Capturable value has always been in the application of knowledge.
Experience will possibly become more valuable as a pipeline of people stop entering many industries. Some of that will be very industry specific in terms of market forces and has still to play out.
People aren’t afraid of being out of a job, they say. It’s the usual jealously guarded guild expertise, by people who haven’t even entered any professions yet.
he also said the people who argue it's inevitable are always the ones with a profit motive lol, which i disagree with only because in tech many people who have an anti-profit motive also say it's inevitable.
Every other world-transforming technology I got in contact with was more organic: the personal computer, the internet, high-speed internet, the smartphone, all of those followed the usual adoption curve. Even technical tools like cloud computing which carried a bit of the anxiety from execs about "being left behind" was much more organic.
AI tools are the only technology where I feel it's been shoved down my throat, it's inevitable and I can't adopt it at my own pace, it needs to happen and it needs to happen now. Not only it's inevitable, the messaging is also chock fully instigating fear, through anxiety, through the feeling of inadequacy if you aren't adopting it.
I sincerely cannot wait until this phase of it bursts, I want to see what's on the other side because right now this side kinda sucks even though I have uses for the technology itself.
The only part here with which I disagree is that I feel very similarly about the smartphone.
Now, a different handful of San Francisco companies are asking for lots of money to disrupt society, and I'm just not interested.
Why can't they be as excited as people already invested into Datacenters? /s
To me it feels like an anti-fur protest by people who themselves are wearing fur coats. Why don't we see news of academics happy that their students have made the u-turn they want?
I thought the outcry against AI was from the universities themselves because the students have all happily embraced it and were using it all the time? But now the outcry seems to be by the students themselves?
Are these different students? Maybe: they seem to be about to leave education instead of using it to pass their exams. They have got their certificates. If they are the same students, maybe it's about their use of AI? Perhaps the reaction is a kind of psychological effect of their use, an effect of shame or guilt? Or maybe its not about their personal use but about a wider adoption by other people and the change in the world around them? They don't see their own use of AI as relevant.
Maybe its about the news stories? They all seem to be hype.
Or perhaps it's a fashionable topic for the latest small protest movement? its news because its new, but its not a widespread movement or is it? Is it more like an anti-car protest by people who are forced to use cars and cant use public transport?
So: Will we see the reduction of use by students on their work, and a kind of happiness by the academics on how their students want to learn properly?
Would you say that the same students who are protesting AI have used AI to graduate? Its ok either way.
Edits - condensing the questions:
1) Are these protests reflective of the majority of students?
2) Do the majority of students use LLMs regularly in education?
Given the above questions what change in education and change in personal AI use might we see?
The Tech Powers That Be has told these young adults that AI will disrupt the job market that they are entering. Maybe decimate white collar work. Granted, maybe this was mostly a few years ago because the ecstatic celebration among the cream of the crop of the parasites seems to have cooled down, maybe because they figured out that telling everyone in office jobs that their tech was supposed to make their lives worse was a bad strategy. But still, that was a narrative that has stuck. So these kinds of people drill that non-consentual thought into young adults’ brain. Then the same kind come to their office job graduation ceremony and take the opportunity to hype AI? Yeah, they struck a nerve that they manufactured themselves.
Two possible conclusions to draw from that.
1. Their social brains are so atrophried and withered from the daily sycophancy (occupational hazard of being very high up on the corporate ladder) that they honestly thought that grads would be happy about AI disrupting the job market (the commoners love when stocks go up?)
2. Signalling to investors that AI Is Still Happening at every damn opportunity is more important than pissing off the people you are supposed to give an inspirational speech to
>AI will lower your wages!!
>AI will be used to track you!!
>AI will surveil you and profile you like never before!!
Then they get surprised why they get booed. Even personally, I don’t think I met any person IRL that sees AI in a positive way. The only people who cheer for it are the techbros-AI-wrappers who want to sell you some slop SaaS, or the ones who benefit from its market manipulation and price gouging.
Eric Schmidt booed at University of Arizona after praising AI
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48172419
Students boo commencement speaker after she calls AI next industrial revolution
"AI" is so bad that people dont have the time to hate it directly, and there lives are such that pragmatism forces them to identify exactly what the source of the problems in the world is,well at least when it stands up and blithers out loud strait at them.
You can tell that they know the music is about to stop and they're all desperate to find a chair. They didn't update their playbook for the next generation and now their cards are showing.
Short-term: oh boy. Long-term: phew.