I was hoping someone would throw tomatoes or something at him.

Maybe a brick or two.

I don't think Schmidt is doing that. He's just drunk the Kool-Aid.

He's a multi-billionaire either way. For him it's not about making more money. It's about his self-image as an important guy in tech who was still on the cutting edge at 71. I don't think he thinks he's important or relevant enough to shape the future anymore. I think he just wants to be seen as someone who can be invited to conferences and public speaking events because he's still relevant.

IMO that's a really, really big part of the AI ecosystem. A lot of executives are implementing AI at their companies because they're afraid they're going to be seen as old fuddy duddies who didn't know that the world had changed.

For most of these commencement speakers, it's more of an "emperor has no clothes" situation than it is a conspiracy to pump up the stock price.

If a machine can do my job better than me, then a machine should be doing that job. That's progress. Eventually all of this mindless toil should be done by machines so that people have the ability to pursue their dreams. The actual problem is that we've built a society where people need to toil mindlessly in order to live. This could be solved with something like a Universal Basic Income, so if my job gets taken by an LLM I can go back to school and learn a new trade. Or write some books. Or go ramble around Europe as an art bum. Or whatever.

Having said that, I think that LLMs are being used to replace jobs where the machine can't do it better than a human. It saves the company money in the short term, but it's going to catch up with them in the long term. On the other hand, some people are doing jobs that don't need doing, and replacing those with an LLM doesn't change anything, because the job was bullshit to begin with.

At the end of the day, people need food, lodging, and healthcare. They don't need "jobs". We should be fighting to get people's needs met, not fighting to keep people in their shitty jobs that they hate anyway.

Counterpoint, we don't need a society that requires universities to churn out graduates who need jobs. That's it, we have everything we need as a society already, and we are well past the post-scarcity part, but someone always wants a bigger boat.

We'll all do what we need to in order to get food, shelter, and all the basics. But we are past the point of needing a 40 hour work week, and putting people into menial positions just so they can get a paycheck.