Technology

Because young people are the ones on whom the burden of actual work always falls, so they can see that it doesn't fucking work

The vision: "Listen up you ungrateful insect. You'll work for nothing, under constant surveillance, until you die early, penniless and in pain, from very preventable conditions. Also, we're just going to fire you randomly. Fuck you"

Because they are graduating into a empty job market

Because it silicon Valley is full of nazi pedos

Then something unexpected happened. Students began to boo.

This was expected by everyone, I recall Eric Schmidt himself talking about how disappointed he was that students were booing but he would turn the students around at his speech.

From there the article roughly seems to be roughly dismissive of the students and pretty bullish about AI anyway. Real Skinner "no, it's the children who are wrong" energy wrapped up in way too many words.

Everyone is rejecting Silicon Valley's vision of the future.

The article author doesn't understand what Silicon Valley's actual vision for the future is, but the students do.

Why would graduates reject a future of technological abundance, economic growth, and unprecedented innovation?

Written like a sycophant. The abundance’s only purpose is to supplant the jobs those graduates will be looking for, cut their compensation, and simultaneously charge them for whatever services the AI rent seeks on. The economic growth is only for the 1%. And the “innovation” is nothing more than finding ways to exploit the public for fees while killing access to information and creating damaging imagery that distorts reality.

Cause it's neither a hopeful nor inspiring future. We see the harms of social media, subscription only services, enshittification everywhere and the youth graduates into a job market where the 'most prestigious' companies aid in several genocides, their leaders and/or owners are pedos, Nazis or both and most important of all keep announcing the end of human labor.

What is there to be excited about?

We owe our children and grand children a better outlook on life.

Speaking as a senior dev: AI has replaced new hires and interns, and the students know it. Why would management hire me juniors when Claude does what they can for cheaper? Will be interesting to see how this ouroboros functions in 10 years when it's still recycling the state of the art as of 2022, and the senior devs start retiring with nothing but agentic backfills.

Good. I believed in personal computers and the internet changing the world. However the promise was that it would make life better for everyone. It only made life better for a select few who then used it to further their own interests. I don't think the new grads have anything to lose by refusing to play the game since it is completely rigged against them.

The children are suppose to use the tech yet they won't. It's like government pushing square dancing in schools.

Because everyone else is too but they have the highest stakes and the least agency so the lazy option is to blame them.

And the Silicon Valley leadershit sure does get salty when people look at the dystopian future and decide to punt on reproduction.

Let’s all just pauze for a moment and try to take in the utter stupidity of Big Tech and US capitalism.

AI has been a thing for over ten years. Even before LLM’s we were doing great things with self-learning algorithms and there was a great deal of enthousiasm about where this technology would take us.

Fast forward to today and the blatant incompetence of AI agents, LLM’s or VLM’s to perform even the most simple tasks, stands in stark contrast to the billions being thrown at tech companies, to the hundreds of data centers popping up to fuel Big Tech’s hot air balloon, to greedy eagerness of corporate America to replace skilled workers with untested and unproven technology and to the devastating effects this AI bubble is having on the real economy.

Don’t get me wrong, AI is definitely the future (even if LLM’s are not). But this AI bubble is an utter waste of capital, resources and talent that could’ve been used to fuel actual AI development and innovation. What we’re seeing is not the birth of a bright new future, but the death throes of a dysfunctional political and economic system.

The deer in the headlights thing with the kids today is real. It's like the way they were raised - in that every move had to be "safe" and "right" - has short circuited the ability ot just leap at a problem, and tackle it.

I am the tech/maintenance/art director of a handful of small shops and work with the kids that are coming out of their first or second years of college (the "summer butterflies", I call them) and I am constantly telling them that in the workplace situation, to not be afraid or hesitate to act on something.

There's a lot of self doubt and not trusting their own gut instincts. (which often are correct) If the action isn't right, that is less an issue than letting the problem fester.

For me, it's about getting the kids to use their smarts - which they DO have - and in the framework of a situation where the answer isn't found with AI, they know more than they believe.

It's not just the pivot to AI, there's also some cultural/political hangover tied to "getting it wrong" that cripples their ability to move. Yes, I remember going through the SAME thing, with the lack of confidence in my late-teens and through my 20's, but the difference was, I did not hesitate to tackle a problem.

Screwed up plenty. Sorted the problems perfectly more often. The willingness to jump is what I always try to encourage.

I'd love to see these kids turn AI into the tool that they want it to be.