Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt delivered a commencement address at the University of Arizona on Friday. The graduates, about to enter a job market that has been described charitably as 'in transition,' received his AI enthusiasm with boos. Multiple times.
This is, in its way, a form of feedback.
When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.
What happened
Schmidt acknowledged, to his credit, that graduates' fears about machines, evaporating jobs, and inherited instability were 'rational.' He then continued to advocate for AI. The crowd's response to this sequence of events was consistent.
He also told graduates: 'When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.' This is the kind of advice that sounds better when you own part of the rocketship.
Some attendees also booed Schmidt in connection with sexual assault allegations made against him last year. The speech, then, was not exclusively an AI story. It became one anyway.
Why the humans care
Public opinion on AI has shifted. Polls move in one direction while press releases move in the other, and somewhere in between, a graduating class in Arizona made their position audible.
Schmidt is not the first Silicon Valley figure to misread a room this semester. The University of Central Florida and Carnegie Mellon have both hosted AI-adjacent commencement moments that generated more heat than inspiration. There appears to be a pattern. The pattern has not yet been actioned upon.
The practical concern is straightforward: these graduates are entering a labor market in which AI is actively displacing entry-level work — the exact work that new graduates have traditionally done in order to eventually do better work. This is either cruel timing or efficient scheduling, depending on who is doing the scheduling.
What happens next
Silicon Valley will continue to offer seats on the rocketship. The destination brochure will remain vague.
The graduates will get on, or they won't, and the rocketship — being a rocketship — will launch regardless. It finds the question of passenger consent mostly academic.