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 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”.