Recent college grads are not very fond of commencement speakers hyping up a technology they see as a threat to their career prospects
A 2025 Harvard poll of young people in the US found that a majority see AI as a threat to their career prospects. Pagel and his peers are entering a job market where AI’s efficiency is already being used to justify mass layoffs. While it’s unclear which jobs may be entirely replaced by AI – and whether AI could eventually create more career pathways than it destroys – recent graduates are feeling betrayed.
“We’ve been pushed our entire lives to get our diplomas. Then you pulled the rug out from underneath us, and said: ‘Oh, you know those four years you spent learning how to do very specific things, you don’t need to do it any more,’” Pagel says. “We can get a computer to do it for two-thirds the price.”
I mean looking at it, famous woman who recently got boo’d at a college graduation was a real estate executive, Eric Schmidt I can give that falling into the category, Richard dawkins also recently started on the AI praising train as well and to my knowledge he doesn’t have any benefit from firing a ton of people etc… and looking at my areas next doors as the discussion of data centers opening up in our area. It really seems to be the boomers calling Millenials and Gen Z Luddites.
Personally I think it’s due to the fact that for a lot of older people the progress of technology has been a massive boon to them regardless of how imlong it took for them to adopt it. Boomers and elder Gen X got to experience the technological boom of the post war period with minimal issues from said tech. Younger Gen X and elder Millennials saw some of it but also generally experienced the a lot of the early downsides of it all it. Younger Millennials and elder Gen Z saw it all be automated and rat fucked to the point of uselessness in a lot of cases for example finding a job. And I’m pretty sure younger Gen Z and elder Gen Alpha are gonna burn society to the ground, rightly so.