Over the weekend, another group of college graduates booed another pro-AI speaker, as ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt failed to read the room at a commencement speech Sunday at the University of Arizona. This thoroughly predictable but nevertheless heart-warming event follows on the heels of University of Central Florida students booing commencement speaker Gloria Caulfield earlier in the month.
Schmidt, like Caulfield, came to tell a bunch of young people staring down a brutal job market that they have to get on board with the smoke-and-mirrors AI future. While Schmidt acknowledged that students might fear that, according to a transcription by Kotaku, “the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create,” he then decided the solution to all this is to swallow the AI bullshit that’s contributing to these evaporating jobs, broken climate, and fractured politics.
“The question is not whether AI will shape the world, it will, the question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence,” Schmidt said. “We do not know the precise contours of what this transformation will look like, but what we do know is it will require each of us to adapt in ways that we cannot yet anticipate. My hope is that you will choose to engage anyway. That you’ll choose to be in the room where these decisions take place and to have a voice in how they’re made. ”
In a video of the booing, Schmidt said, “If you don’t care about science that’s OK, because AI is going to touch everything else as well. Whatever path you choose, AI will become part of how work is done.” He continued, “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on. The rocket ship is here; let me give you some advice. First, find a way to say yes.”
Like Caulfield, Schmidt does not seem to have expected the response, but where Caulfield made a bit of flummoxed light out of it, Schmidt smiled smugly as the students booed. Schmidt closed his remarks by saying “The future is not yet finished,” according to NBC, despite having previously touted the inevitability of AI and exhorting students to get on board.
Prior to his speech, some University of Arizona students planned to protest Schmidt over allegations of sexual assault in a lawsuit filed by his former girlfriend and business partner Michelle Ritter in 2025. That lawsuit went to arbitration in early March 2026, and Schmidt has denied Ritter's claims.
Something that made Caulfield’s speech so weird was that she is a vice president at a company working on “health and medical partnerships” and a planned community in Florida, fields that have surely talked about AI but which you wouldn’t expect to have a real stake in ramming it down students’ throats. Schmidt, who stepped down from Google leadership in 2011 and left parent company Alphabet’s board in 2017, at least has some connection to the technology that gives his speech some context. Schmidt is “among the most prominent voices on technology, AI, business, and philanthropy” according to his own LinkedIn, so he clearly has some sort of stake here, but still: Telling students they have the power to shape the future, but that power will be consigned to helping the machines that are letting a handful of rich men get richer while making the rest of our lives worse is a shockingly tone-deaf thing to say to a bunch of nascent grads, even for a businessman.
The only good thing about this recent “This Is Water but make it AI” trend is getting to revel in the students’ response. For all the ways AI is ruining education, it’s inspiring to watch young people roundly reject it, refuting the inevitability narrative that seems to be the only thing AI companies have left as their products get both worse and more expensive. We might be stuck with this shit until it implodes itself, but we can at least refuse to be conscripted into helping it along. Drag ‘em, kids.
