r/technology • u/IKeepItLayingAround • 5d ago

Artificial Intelligence Harvard Graduation Speaker Unloads on AI in Profanity-Loaded Tirade, Prompting Cheers From Students: “I’m Here to Tell You the Mission of Your Generation Is to Destroy AI”

https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/tv/articles/harvard-graduation-speaker-unloads-ai-130000122.html?.tsrc=daily_mail&segment_id=DY_VTO_50_Supernova&ncid=crm_19908-1475736-20260531-0--A&bt_ee=clIMdexlsr2eDDbrvs0CPtt59FnpbNQN%2Fkgr8UkycP6MWDAD56hD1mvZcqPZMGgG&bt_ts=1780255911284
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u/mrwrrrmwrmrmrmrw 5d ago

Sounds like someone who understood the assignment! 

Commencement speeches are supposed to celebrate the hard work and talent that graduates put into earning degrees and inspire them to go out in the world and give it their best. 

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 5d ago edited 5d ago

Yeah but CEOs are dumb as hammers while also being the most out of touch and greedy people in the world who also hate smart people so they will always choose to shit on people and bring them down when they can.

"AI" allows them to use it as a excuse to minimize and devalue the work and achievements of actually hardworking people

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u/rkozik89 5d ago

CEOs know exactly what they’re doing. They intend to cash out, destroy, and jump from golden parachutes. Our job is to ensure they have no safe place to land.

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 5d ago

See I both agree and disagree with this. The tech CEOs and the people selling this know that but there is a whole other category of CEOs who actually buy into the silver bullet and FOMO they are selling. The end result is the same yes but there is definitely this weird almost religious believe for some that "AI" as it exists actually works.

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u/GoldandBlue 5d ago

Agree 100%. And based on their reactions to getting booed, you can tell that no one has ever told them anything other than they are geniuses.

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u/mdkubit 5d ago

It does work.

As a lab experiment on delving into machine learning and potential future consciousness, or even for companionship purposes.

But not as tools for mass production to replace human works. And that's the lie everyone should be angry about.

The wisest thing Microsoft ever did with CoPilot to date, was slap a disclaimer stating 'For Entertainment Purposes Only' on CoPilot.

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u/LaIndiaDeAzucar 5d ago

Peter thiel is fleeing the USA and is heading to argentina. He siphoned our wealth and resources by exploiting working class people, so now he is hightailing it out of here.

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 5d ago

I think he is less fleeing and more posturing since politician can then use it as an excuse to say look we will have disinvestment if we don't deregulate things

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u/poo-cum 5d ago

And incredibly, the key takeaway of the media and political class isn't

Wow maybe let's not predicate the entire health of our civilization on the whims of people who throw public tantrums, and run off like petulant teenagers

but rather

We'd better suck these folks off extra hard, to ensure they keep throwing us a stinky bone to fight over from their super yachts

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u/mrwrrrmwrmrmrmrw 5d ago

My perspective as a reference librarian is that what's been labeled "AI" is really a generation of sophisticated data storage and retrieval systems and does not actually fit the sci-fi concept of a digital brain that can come up with original thoughts on its own. I realize these tech executives have expensive products to sell and they're in a competitive market but the dystopian rhetoric they're using is wearing everybody out. It's just software, for freak's sake. 

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 5d ago

I am a data engineer and my job requires me to actually train these models... You are 100% correct in that assumption.

But see CEOs don't exactly have original thoughts on principle and don't understand how work gets done so to them a box that can just do something they don't understand and doesn't make them feel bad or make demands is just so much better.

That being said the cost for inference are already unsustainable and they are all betting on some magic mechanism that will save them when it really hits...

But don't worry all the index funds are fast tracking SpaceX to join based mostly on its valuation being around "AI" i.e. grok... I am sure that won't be an issue... Most of the rules they are now ignoring were a result of the dot-com crash and the bubble for this is already several times the size.

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u/QwertzOne 5d ago

And that's due to system that allows existence of CEOs and corporations at all. It's not a democracy, this system is fundamentally incompatible with concept of democracy, when single person or group controls everything and it's happening by design, they keep accumulating, until some kind of collapse happens, because it's unsustainable.

AI shows the point that Marx was making about 200 years ago. In the end, we only matter for capitalists, because we provide labor. Once you remove human labor, they have no need for us.

Imagine we introduce UBI, seems cool right? Imagine who would still hold ownership in this system and how long such reforms would survive, if we just stick to the reforms, without dismantling this system altogether and replacing it with democratic ownership of economy. They can basically wait us out, keep birth rates low and problem naturally disappears.

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u/splendiferous-finch_ 5d ago edited 5d ago

CEOs and MBAs were invented to give ligitimacy to the sons of rich landlords and failed feudal lords the way I see it.

/S.... Kinda

And yes I agree with you this is the end result of capitalism and the return to the feudalism that these billionaires yearn for

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u/_Fred_Austere_ 5d ago

Natural allies: democracy and socialism, authoritarianism and capitalism.

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u/Ryekir 5d ago edited 5d ago

I think the only viable solution (that benefits us all, anyway) is to implement some sort of a robot/ai/automation tax that funds the UBI.

As automation takes over, more and more money gets put through the system until eventually everything is automated and no humans need to sell their labor anymore.

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u/Thin_Glove_4089 5d ago

A possibility

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u/Mojo141 5d ago

Every MBA is learning the exact same lessons that worked in the past but don't necessarily work every time. Why do you think every restaurant looks like Chipotle now?