Commencement season has come around again — and this year, at least a couple speakers have discovered that it’s tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence.
Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we’re living in a time of “profound change,” which can be both “exciting” and “daunting.”
“The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared — prompting the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?”
“Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” — only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he brought up AI at a University of Arizona speech on Friday.
