Good morning. You’d think more commencement speakers would ask their AI chatbot of choice how today’s college graduates feel about artificial intelligence before declaring it the future while the ink is still drying on the grads’ degrees.
It’s been a rough couple of weeks. Real estate executive Gloria Caulfield was the first to prominently step into the muck at the University of Central Florida. Then came former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona and Big Machine CEO Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State. All endured waves of boos for their focus on AI.
If you read the transcripts, the speakers were (mostly) trying to give agency to their audience at a time of great transformation. But they didn’t read the room. Today’s grads don’t want to hear about technology; they want to hear about themselves.
The gold standard for this, of course, is Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005. The late Apple co-founder only mentions the word “technology” once in 15 minutes, opting instead to share three personal stories. “Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking,” he advises at one point. Little did he know how much the Class of 2026 would take that to heart. —Andrew Nusca
