Commencement season has a problem. The future is supposed to be bright at graduation, but this year, when speakers started talking about artificial intelligence, students responded the only way they knew how: they booed.
Last week at the University of Central Florida, real estate executive Gloria Caulfield announced that “the rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” The audience didn’t applaud. They booed so loudly that Caulfield paused mid-speech and asked the other speakers, “What happened?” She tried again moments later, only to get interrupted by more noise from the crowd.
It wasn’t an isolated incident. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced similar resistance at the University of Arizona on Friday when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt had to speak over it, insisting that assembling a team of AI agents would help students accomplish things they couldn’t do alone. The message didn’t land.
The Disconnect Between Tech Optimism and Student Reality
To be clear, not every commencement speaker got roasted. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon without apparent pushback when he said AI has “reinvented computing.” But the trend is notable enough to suggest something real is happening in the collective mood of graduating students.
A recent Gallup poll tells part of the story. Only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a job locally. That’s a steep drop from 75% in 2022. The pessimism isn’t entirely about technology, but journalist and tech critic Brian Merchant framed it in a way that resonates: for many students, AI has become “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.”
“I too would loudly boo at the prospect of this next industrial revolution if I was in my early twenties, unemployed, and had aspirations for my future greater than entering prompts into an LLM,” Merchant wrote.
Schmidt himself seemed aware of this undercurrent. He acknowledged a genuine anxiety in younger generations: “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.”
It’s Deeper Than Just AI
The booing at UCF wasn’t purely about artificial intelligence, though. One student noted that Caulfield had already begun losing the room with generic praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos before she even got to AI. Alexander Rose Tyson, a graduate who was there, told The New York Times that “it wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’”
That collective dismissal is worth taking seriously. Speakers at commencement events aren’t usually met with sustained hostility unless something deeper is off. In this case, it’s a mismatch between what tech leaders are selling (excitement about the future, opportunity through transformation) and what graduating students are experiencing (job scarcity, economic anxiety, uncertainty about what technology means for their career prospects).
Even when graduation speakers steered clear of AI entirely this year, “resilience” became a recurring theme. That word choice alone suggests organizers understood the mood. You don’t tell a room full of optimistic graduates about the importance of resilience. You say it when you’re bracing them for difficulty ahead.
The Generational Reality Check
What makes this moment different from previous tech booms is that the skepticism is coming from people directly entering the workforce, not from older observers watching from the sidelines. These students have grown up during multiple tech cycles. They’ve seen promises of disruption and transformation. They’ve also watched as those transformations created winners and losers, often without clear lines for how to be on the winning side.
The anxiety around AI specifically tracks with real concerns within the tech industry itself. Workers at major tech companies have openly worried about their own job security as AI capabilities expand. When even the people building these systems are nervous, it’s not surprising that fresh graduates would be skeptical of speeches framing AI as an unambiguous opportunity.
None of this means AI won’t reshape business and society. It probably will. But the booing at commencement events is a reminder that technological change and human flourishing aren’t automatic companions. One requires intentional choices about the other, and those choices haven’t been particularly reassuring to watch so far.
