Here’s a rare news event that hasn’t occurred in, gosh, a week: a university commencement speech was greeted with hostility because the speaker praised AI. 404 Media got the footage: In fairness, the speaker, ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt was at least trying to thread the needle, vaguely empathizing with students. “There is a fear in your generation that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics are fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create,” he said. But, as in the case of real estate executive Gloria Caulfield, whose pro-AI speech one week ago triggered an almost identical reaction, it’s easy to see how Schmidt’s words could be perceived as arrogant to a crowd that had heard the AI-inevitability message before a million times. He can be heard telling the crowd of young people they will “help shape artificial intelligence” and that, “If you don’t care about science, that’s okay, because AI is gonna touch everything else as well.” In perhaps his most ill-advised moment in the 404 Media footage, Schmidt says: “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.” I suspect the crowd was probably already picturing itself relegated to steerage on the great “rocket ship” of AI, but Schmidt spelled it out anyway.