Amid layoffs across tech companies and artificial intelligence (AI) boom, a sense of dread among the young graduates who are about to enter the workforce has just started to settle. And how they are dealing with it? By making their boos sound louder.
Amid recent few incidents of students booing the tech leaders at a slightest mention of the AI boom, has revealed how he plans to deal with the nearly awkward situation. Sundar Pichai is set to deliver a commencement speech at Stanford University next month.
What will Sundar Pichai do?
Speaking at tech podcast “Hard Fork” recently, Sundar Pichai said that he feels optimistic about the next generation as they would be the ones driving it and feeling the impact of it.
The Google CEO said, “I’ve always been extraordinarily optimistic about the next generation. My goal would be to share my experiences, and that’s what I’m looking to do. These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact.”
“Humans aren’t evolved to process that much change.”
In a speech this week, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told graduating University of Arizona students that the ” than anything before.
“It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have,” Eric Schmidt said as boos rang out.
“I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating … and I understand that fear,” he said.
Even as he acknowledged the job insecurity terming the young generation’s fears as “rational”, Schmidt asserted that the change was inevitable that everyone needed to adapt to.
Some even criticised the irony of the speech. A student said, “We as students are discouraged from using it and penalized for using it. And then to have our speaker be the champion of AI is just like, OK? Why?”
Another speaker, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, also faced boos when she highlighted the advent of artificial intelligence during a keynote this month at the University of Central Florida.
Gloria Caulfield said, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” as boos erupted, and she added, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives. And now, AI capabilities are in the palm of our hand,” as more jeering erupted.
(With agency inputs)
