Egalitarians like this wonderful woman want no rich and no poor, the opposite goal of our rulers who intend to use AI to make the rich richer and the poor poorer.
As Newsbreak.com reports, huge numbers of Florida college graduates hurled boos at their commencement speaker who praised AI:
View a CNN video showing the speaker drawing boos whenever she said anything positive about AI:
Newsbreak reported:
While Caufield was discussing technological innovations, she remarked that it was “an understatement” to say we were now “living in a time of profound change.”
“Change is exciting,” she continued. “Very exciting. And let’s face it, change can be daunting. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution –”
The graduates began booing and Caufield nervously laughed and looked momentarily confused.
“Whew! What happened?” she asked, turning behind her as the booing increased in volume and one person could be heard yelling, “AI sucks!”
“Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?”
“Uhh, only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives,” Caulfield said, this time being interrupted by loud cheers and applause from the audience.
She was once again taken aback by the reaction. “Okay. All right. Okay, we — we’ve got a bipolar topic here, I see. Okay. Uh, and now AI capabilities are in the palm of our hands –”
Cue more booing from the graduates.
“– And — oh, I love it. Passion, let’s go, okay –” she said, as she got back into her prepared remarks.
Caulfield perhaps could have anticipated this response, considering that the graduates she was addressing had majored in fields including journalism, communications, humanities, arts, digital media, film and television production, advertising, and public relations that are often mentioned in discussions about AI’s impacts — specifically the negative ones.
Orlando Weekly’sChloe Greenberg covered the graduation speech and interviewed several graduates, describing Caulfield’s “ill-timed comment” in her speech as turning the commencement into a “brief humiliation ritual.”
Greenberg quoted Houda Eletr, a graduate of the Nicholson School of Communication and Media, who had dunked on Caulfield as a “corporate mouthpiece” and joined in the booing:
“To stand in front of a graduating class of artists and communicators and discuss Jeff Bezos and Howard Schultz, is to spit on our efforts to flip the script. I’m embarrassed to have had to endure the most embarrassing, unskippable, tone-deaf, ad-like commencement. Boo to AI and boo to your agenda,” Eletr told Orlando Weekly.
“It will not be the rise of AI that is the next Industrial Revolution; it will be the boo-ers who refuse to take a check from the top 1% to present an empty agenda. It will be humans for humans.”
Three cheers for these graduating students. Let the rich tremble in fear of what these graduates aim to do to make our world be one that is good for the vast majority and not one where the rich use AI to enrich themselves at the expense of all others.
Watch the video above via YouTube (Caulfield’s remarks begin around the 1:15:00 mark).
Thanks for pointing this out, John. It’s good to know that some young people understand and are angry about how their future is being taken from them for the sake of the billionaires.
What happened to the campus revolts of the 60s? The students graduated (one of many reasons). Nowadays in the mediatrix, when the most militant gestures consist of cancel-culture replacing counter-culture (both (re)created in focus groups), spectacles are the stuff of momentary mimics of resistance to bizzness as usual, in which most graduates of ruling institutions will continue to serve, just doing their jobs in the tradition of a "banality of evil" (Arendt) that will still allow them controlled dissent.
Building an egalitarian revolution requires much more than this. The apparently long-forgotten covid coup, in which most universities overnight became concentration campuses, is the defining precedent for higher (l)earning in the technocratic era, of which AI is the next stage of global class war on humanity, whether the proles like it or not. If more of us, whatever our hierarchical ranks, don't break away from bizzness as usual to build revolutionary social relations of enduring practice to challenge the all too organized powers that be, we'll simply end up building our own prisons across the planet.