The great Paul Simon described the late 20th century as \u201cthe days of miracle and wonder\u201d and he was not wrong. Back then, technological advances felt thrillingly life-enhancing, and by the 1990s it seemed as though we were only one Steve Jobs invention away from a world where our potential was not just fulfilled but exceeded. Nora Ephron wrote and directed the 1998 romantic comedy You\u2019ve Got Mail, which was really an ode to email. Apple stores were secular temples at which the masses worshipped.<\/p>\n
That giddily techno-optimistic era is now very much over. Ephron foresaw this 15 years ago when, on a list of things she wouldn\u2019t miss when she died, she included \u201cemail\u201d not once but twice. The rest of us \u2014 distracted by our iPhones and social media \u2014 took longer to come round, but a video last week of the commencement speech given by Eric Schmidt, former chief executive of Google, at the University of Arizona shows just how furiously the worm has turned.<\/p>\n
\u201c[AI] will touch every relationship you have. Whatever path you choose, AI will become a part of how work is done,\u201d he said, sounding more menacing than inspiring. The students booed louder with every mention of AI, but Schmidt\u2019s smile didn\u2019t waver: \u201cFind a way to say yes,\u201d he commanded by way of a conclusion. Sure, you\u2019re now saddled with enormous amounts of debt, graduates, but say yes to the machine that is eating up the job market. Learn to love Big Brother!<\/p>\n
That was at least the second commencement speech in a week in which graduates jeered references to AI: \u201cThe rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution!\u201d crowed Gloria Caulfield, a real estate executive, at the University of Central Florida. When the students booed, she said, \u201cWe\u2019ve got a bipolar topic here, I see.\u201d Which suggested, if nothing else, that AI could probably do a better job of giving a commencement speech than someone who doesn\u2019t know the difference between \u201cbipolar\u201d (suffering from a mental health condition) and \u201cdivisive\u201d (controversial).<\/p>\n
Tech bros dismiss middle-aged people like me who hate what smartphones and education technology are doing to kids as irrelevant old Luddites. But now young people feel real fear and loathing towards Silicon Valley in a way that is wholly new. And who can blame them? No longer is tech about helping each of us to expand our life; it\u2019s about contracting it and stealing it. Smartphones shrank the world to a screen, and now AI is swallowing the future. And they really expect kids to cheer for this, the way my generation once cheered for, I don\u2019t know, iPods?<\/p>\n
Strangely, no US university asked me to give a commencement speech this \u2014 or any \u2014 year. But I\u2019m as qualified as any tech bro or real estate exec, so here is my commencement speech.<\/p>\n
Class of 2026, congratulations. I will start with a quote from another commencement speech, one made before many of you were born: \u201cChoose what you pay attention to.\u201d David Foster Wallace said that in 2005, years before smartphones, ChatGPT and so much else that you grew up with even existed. And yet that advice is more true now than it was then. We live, as the clich\u00e9 goes, in an attention economy, and that is actually a good way to think of your attention: as a valuable commodity, like gold coins. <\/p>\n
Unfortunately, most of what is competing for your attention now is garbage. You know this from having grown up with short-form videos, social media likes and all this other ultra-processed food for your brain, making it lazy and stupefied. You have a choice whether you want to keep pumping that garbage into your brain or start paying your precious attention to something else. But what?<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s put that to the side for a moment and I\u2019ll tell you where I think my generation went wrong. We believed that life should be easy. So we invented things to take out all of life\u2019s frictions. Lonely? Scroll through Facebook<\/a>! Frustrated? Here\u2019s some online pornography! Struggling with your essay? Get AI to write it for you<\/a>! I don\u2019t know what we thought we\u2019d do with all the time we were saving. Maybe sit alone on the sofa and scroll on our phones until we got to the bottom of the internet.<\/p>\n But without friction, life is slop. AI is great for things humans can\u2019t or really don\u2019t want to do. But to have a bot do your creative work for you is as pointless as having a robot do physical exercise for you. Yes, the process is hard, but it\u2019s in the process that you will find out what you think, what you love and what your limitations are. Who you are, in other words. And that is why art made by AI always feels unsatisfying and off, like a friend\u2019s face that\u2019s been rearranged by plastic surgery. The humanity is gone. And so it is meaningless, like a life without hard work, frustration and achievement.<\/p>\n I am so sorry that my generation has created these technological black holes that are consuming the job market. Keep calling out the billionaires who cashed out your future and don\u2019t be distracted by the nonsense on your phone, which exists to lull you into slack-jawed passivity. Focus instead on finding what you can do, and work on doing it well, because unlike the LLMs, you are a human, which means you can create things with soul rather than slop, and soul is what endures. These are still the days of miracle and wonder, because the miracle and wonder is in all of you.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The great Paul Simon described the late 20th century as \u201cthe days of miracle and wonder\u201d and he…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601754,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-601753","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601753","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601753"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601753\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601753"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601753"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601753"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}