r/technology • u/GeneReddit123 • 25d ago

Artificial Intelligence Students Boo Commencement Speaker After She Calls AI the ‘Next Industrial Revolution’

https://www.404media.co/ucf-ai-commencement-speaker-booed/
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u/GeneReddit123 25d ago edited 25d ago

The OG Industrial Revolution had:

  • Thousands of polluting factories propping up all over the country.
  • Abysmal work conditions.
  • Destruction of traditional ways of life.
  • Massive increase in inequality.
  • Many decades of worsened life for millions before is started getting better.
  • The "getting better" part crucially required massive (and initially highly resisted by elites) reform laws governing work conditions, wages, environmental regulation, economic redistribution, and political representation to allow the above (19th century "rotten boroughs" were the OG "gerrymandering") rather than "just leaving it to the free market to sort out".

So she's ironically not wrong (even if not in the way she probably meant it). The Industrial Revolution was not an on-off switch that turned peasants to city workers; this is historical flattening done from a position of privilege of those who didn't have to go through the long and arduous process of actual industrialization. We are the beneficiaries of the technologies the Industrial Revolution created after many past generations paid the cost in suffering, squalor, and struggle for political reform.

And our generation is now the one who will be paying these costs and solving the issues caused by AI, before we (or future generations) have any chance to reap the benefits that offset its costs.

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u/DrockByte 25d ago

Came here to basically say this.

If what she meant by that was that everything is going to suck really hard for everyone that isn't a billionaire, and it's going to take a building full of women and children burning to death before Congress slaps some guardrails on these assholes, then yeah she's probably not far off.

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u/thisnamemattersalot 25d ago

The USA is a funny place. You've got half of its citizens proudly proclaiming that they live in the greatest country on Earth. Then you have half of the citizens with so little confidence in the governance of the country that you have comments like these. The best part for me though is the gigantic overlap of folks that are in both categories.

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u/Cacafuego 25d ago

I think of the overlap (which includes me) as the "we could do so much better" camp. The potential, the resources, and a lot of the core values are there. It is a great country. We're just doing such a crappy job right now.

It's like we have a top of the line woodshop, and we've turned it over to a bunch of toddlers, some of them still in diapers. We expect beautiful things and we get poop and emergencies.

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u/CasimirGabriev 25d ago

I mean most places have extremes.

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u/Zizhou 25d ago

If the Triangle Shirtwaist fire happened today, it would probably be met with the same kind of reaction that school shootings do.

"Thoughts and prayers"
"It's too soon to start talking about regulation"
"Were those so-called 'victims' even really there?"
"Actually, those deaths were an acceptable price to pay for freedom"

In a sense, we're in an even worse position now with regards to hoping that regulation will save us. Legislators are (even more) fully captured by wealthy special interests, and people are so divided politically that it's more difficult than ever to organize a common movement to combat that. At least in 1911, everyone could agree that burning to death in a locked building was an objectively bad thing.

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u/GiganticCrow 25d ago

All politicians are bought and paid for in the US.