Here is a sentence I never thought I would write: I am kind of looking forward to this year’s graduation ceremonies. As parents of 10 children, my husband and I have attended a lot of these events, and they are almost uniformly tedious, clichéd and very close to pointless.
But this year, a theme is emerging: Commencement speakers are talking about artificial intelligence changing the world—and the graduates are booing them. I guess it is perverse, but part of me hopes we catch some of the action. Those boos give me hope for the future.
In one clip, the vice president of a tech company is thoroughly taken aback to discover that young adults graduating from the University of Central Florida are not super excited to welcome the approaching tsunami of A.I. “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next Industrial Revolution,” she says, and the graduates respond with an unmistakably hostile roar. “Oh! What happened? I struck a chord! May I finish?,” she responds, giggling nervously. They do not let her finish; they interrupt her repeatedly as she gets more and more flustered but sticks to her script.
At another ceremony, Eric Schmidt, the former chief executive officer of Google, seems more prepared for the boos that greet his praise of A.I., but he ascribes the crowd’s hostility entirely to fear. He offers his often-repeated advice: “If you’re offered a seat on a rocket ship, don’t ask what seat. Just get on.” When the graduates don’t seem to like that, he appears irritated, even contemptuous.
One more clip, slightly different but in the same vein: Glendale Community College used an A.I.-generated “voice” to “read” and announce the names of the graduates, presumably to avoid awkward mispronunciations. But there was a glitch, and whole pages of names got left out or mismatched. The college’s president acknowledged they had used A.I., and the boos began and increased as she explained they could not fix it. Very illustrative: A whole swath of people undeservedly left out of an unrepeatable experience, just because someone decided to use A.I. I hope the president meant it when she said, “Lesson learned.”
As I say, all that booing warmed my heart and gave me hope for the future—up to a point.
I am still slowly working my way through Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, “Magnifica Humanitas,” and so far I am liking, loving and feeling challenged by everything I read. The pope, a practical man, is taking pains to address not only global movements and the behavior of billionaires who shape society but also what we do as individuals: how we behave in our everyday lives, how we treat the people with whom we live side-by-side and how we understand ourselves as immortal souls with inherent dignity and meaning before God.
That last part is the hard part: the part we are actually in charge of.
As much as I want to believe that the older generations who are passing away are the ones who are enamored of A.I., and the upcoming generation who will shape our future is roundly rejecting it, I am skeptical that this is actually the case.
For every sound bite I enjoyed of graduates booing the great robot revolution, I heard half a dozen teachers last month lamenting that all of their students—every last one—uses A.I. to write their essays. Many in this generation pay money to go to school, do not read the assignments and make robots write essays for them—and they do not see anything wrong with it. They cannot imagine doing things any other way.
That is so much worse than letting a machine read your name at a graduation ceremony. But it is how this is playing out. As fashionable as it is in some quarters to abhor generative A.I., most people like it. It is fun. It is cool. And above all, it is easy.
It is also easy to boo and protest huge, faceless forces inexorably inserting A.I. into every facet of our civil lives against our will. It is harder to reject it when it is something less global but which we actually have the power to reject.
It is one thing to join in a crowd booing and laughing at a special event. It is another to have some boring or difficult task due and to make the hard human choice to do an imperfect job of it yourself, rather than tapping out a prompt and slapping your name on the results.
It is one thing to share a meme saying you refuse to go to an event advertised with an A.I. flyer, but quite another to stay home when you realize that all of your friends and family and colleagues are absolutely going. Everyone around you is using A.I. constantly, and if you don’t, you will absolutely be left behind.
It is one thing to laugh at billionaires thinking they can find something better than love with a high-tech fembot programmed to cater to all their desires. It is another to sit in a room, lonely, full of doubt and fear, and know how easy it will be to log on and order up some instant affirmation from a flattering chatbot.
It is one thing to share posts about how irreplaceable human life is. It is another to choose suffering because suffering is human.
The rise of A.I. presents us with some massive, unstoppable trends we truly cannot reverse—and also with some small, personal, everyday choices that we really can make.
This is true not only of A.I. but of everything, every aspect of life. We are powerless in countless ways, but we do have control over the little choices right in front of us. This is the awful part: That littleness, that lack of power, is our strength. As Pope Leo says in “Magnifica Humanitas,” “Building for the common good means accepting the limits and weakness of humanity without considering them an error to be corrected.” I don’t like that! I want to move mountains and change the world! Or, conversely, I want to be so helpless that there is nothing I can do, and I can just shrug and relax.
But neither is true. I am neither all-powerful nor completely helpless. Humanity dwells in an uncomfortable in-between spot, and the little, difficult choices that we can make are what make us human.
Sometimes I am skeptical that the young people will choose that hard middle road—that the same ones who boo at A.I. when it is cringe will resist A.I. when it is alluring. But sometimes I am hopeful because sometimes I am wrong. I was skeptical at first when my children unfailingly pushed back against my Gen-X habit of judging people based on their looks. I thought they were just paying lip service to a trendy attitude; but my younger children seem truly acclimated to the idea that judging people based on their appearance is simply not acceptable. I have seen children start small, adopting attitudes because that is what their friends and their favorite celebrities are doing, and then eventually thinking about the implications more deeply, and making a choice to live those ideals in larger ways, toward a broader range of people—even when it is hard. I have seen it happen, and I have even started to follow their lead.
People can change, and the changes they make really do matter. I am sorry if I sound like a commencement speaker right now, but sometimes clichés are true: The children really are our future. They are the ones who shoot for the stars and believe in themselves, and sometimes they are the change they wish to see in the world. Maybe they will even win the war against the robots. Or maybe they will just resist becoming robots themselves. That would be magnificent.
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