Did you see those videos of the commencement speakers getting booed these last couple of weeks? I did.

I'll be honest — I was a little uncomfortable watching them. Not because the speakers were wrong. But because I've been in rooms like that. I've stood at a lectern and made the case for AI to people who weren't sure they wanted to hear it. I know what it feels like when the energy in a room shifts. When the questions signal the slow descent into rabbit-holes. And watching those videos, I kept thinking: I get both sides of this. I do.

Quick catch-up: the speaker at the University of Central Florida was Gloria Caulfield, VP of strategic alliances at Tavistock Development Company, calling AI "the next industrial revolution" to a room of arts and humanities and communications graduates. The crowd booed and someone yelled "AI sucks!"

A week later, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed multiple times at the University of Arizona as he compared AI to the rise of the computer. To his credit, he heard it and named it in real time — "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, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create" — but then kept going anyway.

And then there was Scott Borchetta, CEO of Big Machine Records, at Middle Tennessee State. "This industry will change on you in a heartbeat. AI is rewriting production as we sit here." A few stray boos. He doubled down: "Deal with it." The jeering got louder. He barreled through: "It's a tool. Make it work for you. The things you learned in your first year here may already be obsolete."

Three ceremonies. Three executives. Three rooms that booed.

If they were booing technology, they'd be booing their phones. They're not.

A 2025 survey by the London School of Economics found that AI usage is far more common among Gen Z workers — 83 percent — than Baby Boomers at 52 percent. These kids use it. They use it constantly. They wrote with it, studied with it, probably ran their Department of Education promissory notes through it.

What they were booing, I think, is the pitch.

The pitch goes like this. AI is the next industrial revolution. It will reshape every industry. It will replace knowledge work. It will 10x your output. It will create trillions in value. And also — and this is the part where the music swells — it will be good for you, we promise, in ways we'll figure out later.

(The "we'll figure out later" is doing a lot of work in that sentence.)

Jacob Pagel graduated from Middle Tennessee State this spring. Political science and human development. He was in the room when Borchetta told graduates that AI was already rewriting the industry in real time.

Pagel told The Guardian the boos weren't really about the technology itself. They were about the feeling that executives kept minimizing what students already understood perfectly well: that they were walking into a job market where "efficiency" increasingly sounds like a euphemism for fewer entry-level jobs.

These students don't sound confused. They sound exhausted. They spent years being told to get the degree, build the résumé, learn the skills, prepare for the future — and now they're being told, right at graduation, that the future may no longer need quite so many humans after all.

That's not fear. Fear is: I don't understand this.

This is something colder: I understand exactly what this could mean for me, and I'd like everyone on stage to stop pretending it's automatically good news.

The numbers suggest the room may be reading this more accurately than the people on stage. Over the past year, Gen Z's excitement about AI is down fourteen percentage points. Hopefulness down nine. Anger up nine points to 31 percent. The Harvard Youth Poll found that 59 percent of eighteen-to-twenty-nine-year-olds now see AI as a threat to their job prospects — more than immigration, more than outsourcing. Nearly half expect fewer opportunities. Only 14 percent expect gains.

Sarah Kreps, a Cornell professor who studies societies' reactions to new technology, put it plainly: "These tech executives are not reading the room. These kids have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a degree that they don't know will serve them well."

If you've watched the last twenty years, you've seen this movie. Social media built trillion-dollar companies and gutted local media. Streaming reorganized Hollywood and the music industry and squeezed the people who actually create. Gig apps got you a ride and dissolved labor stability into an app rating. Housing went up. Tuition went up. Wages did not keep up.

So when someone walks on stage and says "this is the next industrial revolution," students hear: a small number of people are about to become incomprehensibly wealthy while the rest of you are gonna have to adapt. Which, fair or unfair, is not actually an irrational interpretation of the last twenty years.

Silicon Valley keeps saying AI will free humans from repetitive labor. Which sounds wonderful right up until you realize your repetitive labor currently pays your rent.

I watched The AI Doc on Peacock this week and had the strange experience of hearing my own TEDx talk — that the future AI is pointing toward is both exciting and unnerving at exactly the same time. The tools are remarkable. The social transition around the tools is another matter entirely.

To be clear, I understand the abundance argument. I've seen two-pizza teams do work that used to require agencies, studios, and venture funding. I've watched people with no technical background prototype products and launch ideas that would have been impossible two years ago (ahem, yours truly). AI could dramatically lower barriers to entrepreneurship, accelerate scientific discovery, and give individuals leverage that previously only institutions had. History suggests technological revolutions eventually produce new kinds of jobs too.

Which is comforting unless you happen to be graduating during the "eventually" part.

Abundance that feels inaccessible politically or economically doesn't feel like abundance. It feels like someone else's upgrade.

Generational wealth or permanent underclass. Yikes.

I run AICV. I help local businesses figure out how to use these tools. I think AI is going to be enormous. I also remember the first time I heard someone confidently explain that humanoid robots would eventually replace human drivers — and that this was somehow supposed to sound exciting to the people currently driving for a living.

So I’m not exactly a neutral observer here. I’m in the robe and I’m in the audience.

Which is maybe why I keep thinking about the data center proposal a few miles east of where I’m writing this.

If you live here, you probably already know the outline. Stronghold Power Systems is proposing six data center buildings across 240 acres on Coachella’s eastern edge — roughly 3 million square feet operating between 270 and 300 megawatts. Developers say it would generate $21 million in annual revenue and hundreds of local jobs. The town hall earlier this month was not a polite affair. Residents clashed with city officials and developers. Some people were removed from the meeting. In a parched valley. In a drought. Across the street from mobile home parks.

And to be fair, regions like ours also don’t want to miss the next economic wave entirely. The valley wants investment, jobs, tax base, relevance. That tension is real.

But what I keep returning to is this: the conversation in Coachella is, at its core, the same conversation happening in those commencement arenas.

It’s not really about whether the technology is good or bad.

It’s about who gets to participate in the upside.

Look at the structure of most AI announcements right now. The productivity gains go to the platform. The market cap goes to the platform. The energy comes from the grid — that’s us. The water comes from the aquifer — also us. The displaced workers get told to “adapt.” And the communities hosting the infrastructure get temporary construction jobs and maybe a fire station.

Imagine a different proposal.

One where hyperscale infrastructure projects come bundled with local equity participation, compute grants for schools and small businesses, scholarship funding, subsidized residential power programs, and some form of permanent civic upside tied directly to the facility itself.

Not utopia. Not socialism. Just terms.

The kind of terms a sophisticated landlord might ask for if the tenant was becoming one of the most valuable industries on earth.

It would change the pitch.

Instead of: “The future is coming and you should be grateful.”

The pitch becomes: “The future is coming, and here is your actual stake in it.”

One of those proposals gets booed. The other one, probably doesn’t.

Fewer and fewer people trust that the future is being built for them.

The AI industry keeps talking about inevitability. The public keeps asking about participation. Those are not the same conversation.

So two ways to read the booing.

You can read it as a generation that doesn't get it, that needs better messaging, that should be encouraged to lean in and adapt and reskill and embrace the inevitable. That's the read most of Silicon Valley is going with this month.

Or you can read it as a generation that gets it perfectly — and is asking a question nobody on stage seems particularly interested in answering:

Who exactly is this future for?

I don't know which read is right.

Although, I think the boos may have been the most honest part of the ceremony.

Sat Singh builds AI products and runs AI workshops in Rancho Mirage. He also occasionally boos during AI demos (internally).

Summer Series Saturday Morning AI Workshops are starting soon at ERC/CSUSB. Reach out if you wanna co-host or lead one.