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.”
It’s not young vs old, it’s capital-owning class vs everyone else. AI is trying to solve a trillion dollar problem: paying wages. If you live off wages you hate ai because it endangers your livelihood. If you live off your capital you love ai because you get more of the pie.
Yeah this seems right. It’s not comparable to who was excited about computers or even automobiles. It’s comparable to who was excited about offshoring, colonisation, or slavery.
So class war as usual.
This is a lesson I learned during COVID.
People’s stances are highly correlated with what makes them money.
That tells me that we will never have an honest society until you don’t have to constantly worry about making a living,
While willfully ignoring the upcoming rug pull once AI becomes too entrenched to decouple and the providers jack up the price a hundredfold. Hell, some of them have already begun the process and CEOs still haven’t noticed the noose they’re tying around their own necks.
One case where enshittification is a good thing.
It’s already happening. AI is already more expensive than humans.
I mean doesnt even seem fully that. It looks more like the political leanings in right vs left. IE going with my local area… it’s quite a lot of broke as hell people singing the praises and trying to say “no they said the new data center will generate it’s own power, our prices won’t change at all when they add the data center”, and “see look it will only use half the water as the large car manufacturing plant we already have that employs half this city”.