THE AI REVOLUTION?

STUDENTS ARE RISING UP

I woke up this morning to read, first, about a commencement speech that Google’s former CEO Eric Schmidt gave at the University of Arizona. Some 9,000 students were on hand to hear Schmidt encourage them to “find a way to say yes” to artificial intelligence, because it was a “rocket ship” that was going to change the world.

Well, the audience started to boo. And they didn’t stop. It felt in some ways like a time capsule had dropped into the Sixties (when, full disclosure, I came of age). Nothing Schmidt said could appease these students. Certainly not his asking them to “choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better. America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that.”

True enough, I guess, before we entered the Ice Age.

Then I went to my inbox and found an email waiting from my poet friend and organic farmer Teddy Macker. He sounds “mad as hell and not gonna take it anymore,” like people used to shout out their windows in the movie Network. Here’s what he had to say.

BY TEDDY MACKER: The environmental impacts of A.I. data centers alone (impacts so extreme they defy easy comprehension) should be enough to inspire a historic resistance (a resistance which perhaps is brewing). As you may have heard, one incipient data center “campus” in Utah will require twice as much energy as the entire state. OpenAI, if it has its druthers, will require by 2033 as much energy as all of India. (Please read those two sentences again.) The ensuing earth-savaging (and war-dependent) pursuit of fossil fuel and the accompanying pollution and climate derangement (not to mention the draining of aquifers; the “development” [read soul-offending uglification] of beautiful lands; the harming of nearby communities and land value; and the genuinely insanity-inducing noise pollution) could make our current disequilibrium and rapacity seem almost gentle. And for what? Possible widespread “job elimination”? (Fortune magazine, May of 2025: “Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI could wipe out roughly 50% of all entry-level white-collar jobs.”) Dystopian warfare? (Robot dogs and “autonomous” drones and the bombing of girls’ schools.) The “outsourcing” of human creativity? (Who needs human-made music and poetry and novels and movies?) A.I. friends and lovers for our precious children? (Such relationships are already happening.) The progressive disembodiment of the human being? (Who needs the “drudgery” of physical work?) The proliferation of “deep fakes”? The end of human life on earth? (For whatever it’s worth, we’re being warned by many—some of whom are A.I.’s creators—that this new technology might actually spell our ruin. Paul Kingsnorth, for example, has repeatedly mentioned that Sir Geoffrey Hinton, the British so-called “godfather of A.I.,” thinks there’s a lively chance A.I. will lead to “total human extinction.”)

As icing on the cake, we’re being told that this technology is inevitable, is in fact already here, so there’s no use fighting against it, no use arguing with reality. That’s what shrill, reactionary, nostalgic, future-afraid, socially lubberly Luddites do!

In light of the above, it’s no small wonder we’re now seeing this sort of thing:

Former Google CEO Booed for AI Commencement Speech

As Tom Petty sang, it’s wake up time. It’s time to open our eyes.

With heartfelt concern,

Teddy