If you’re giving a commencement speech in 2026, maybe don’t mention AI

如果你要在 2026 年发表毕业典礼演讲，或许别提人工智能

Commencement season has come around again — and this year, a couple speakers have discovered that it’s tough to get graduating students excited about a future shaped by artificial intelligence. 毕业季又到了——今年，几位演讲者发现，要让毕业生对人工智能塑造的未来感到兴奋，实在是一件难事。

Last week, Gloria Caulfield, an executive at real estate firm Tavistock Development Company, gave a speech at the University of Central Florida acknowledging that we’re living in a time of “profound change,” which can be both “exciting” and “daunting.” “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution,” Caulfield declared — prompting the students in the audience to begin booing, getting louder and louder until Caulfield chuckled, turned to the other speakers, and asked, “What happened?” “Okay, I struck a chord,” she said. 上周，房地产公司 Tavistock Development Company 的高管格洛丽亚·考尔菲德（Gloria Caulfield）在佛罗里达中央大学发表演讲时表示，我们正生活在一个“深刻变革”的时代，这既“令人兴奋”又“令人望而生畏”。“人工智能的崛起是下一次工业革命，”考尔菲德宣称——这引发了台下学生的嘘声，嘘声越来越大，直到考尔菲德轻笑一声，转向其他演讲者问道：“发生了什么？”“好吧，我触动了大家的神经，”她说。

Caulfield then tried to resume her speech, saying, “Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives” — only to be interrupted again by the audience, this time by their loud cheers and applause. 随后，考尔菲德试图继续她的演讲，说道：“就在几年前，人工智能还不是我们生活中的一个因素”——结果再次被观众打断，这一次是响亮的欢呼和掌声。

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt faced a similar response when he brought up AI at a University of Arizona speech on Friday. In Schmidt’s case, the criticism actually began before the speech itself, with some student groups calling for him to be removed as commencement speaker due to a lawsuit in which a former girlfriend and business partner accused Schmidt of sexual assault. (He has denied the allegations.) According to a local news report, the booing began even before Schmidt took the stage. 前谷歌首席执行官埃里克·施密特（Eric Schmidt）周五在亚利桑那大学发表演讲时提到人工智能，也遭遇了类似的反应。就施密特而言，批评实际上在演讲开始前就已经开始了，一些学生团体要求取消他作为毕业典礼演讲嘉宾的资格，原因是一起诉讼中，他的一位前女友兼商业伙伴指控施密特性侵。（他否认了这些指控。）据当地新闻报道，嘘声在施密特登台前就已经开始了。

But Schmidt also got loud boos when he told students, “You will help shape artificial intelligence.” The booing was persistent enough that Schmidt tried to speak over it, insisting, “You can now assemble a team of AI agents to help you with the parts that you could never accomplish on your own. When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat, you just get on.” 但当施密特告诉学生“你们将帮助塑造人工智能”时，他也遭到了响亮的嘘声。嘘声持续不断，以至于施密特试图盖过嘘声继续发言，他坚持道：“你们现在可以组建一个人工智能代理团队，来帮助你们完成那些你们独自永远无法完成的工作。当有人邀请你登上火箭飞船时，你不要问是哪个座位，你直接上去就行了。”

To be fair, AI isn’t becoming a third rail at every graduation ceremony. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently spoke at Carnegie Mellon’s commencement, and he didn’t seem to get any audible pushback when he said that AI has “reinvented computing.” 平心而论，人工智能并没有成为每场毕业典礼上的“禁忌话题”。英伟达首席执行官黄仁勋最近在卡内基梅隆大学的毕业典礼上发表演讲时，当他说人工智能已经“重塑了计算”时，似乎并没有引起任何明显的抵触。

Still, it’s not exactly surprising to find some students in a booing mood. In a recent Gallup poll, only 43% of Americans aged 15 to 34 said it’s a good time to find a job locally, a steep drop from 75% in 2022. That pessimism isn’t solely a response to the rise of AI (a shift that even some software engineers are worried about), but journalist and tech industry critic Brian Merchant suggested that for many students, AI has become “the cruel new face of hyper-scaling capitalism.” 尽管如此，发现一些学生情绪激动、发出嘘声并不令人意外。在最近的一项盖洛普民意调查中，只有 43% 的 15 至 34 岁美国人表示现在是当地找工作的好时机，较 2022 年的 75% 大幅下降。这种悲观情绪不仅仅是对人工智能崛起的反应（这种转变甚至让一些软件工程师也感到担忧），但记者兼科技行业评论家布莱恩·莫钱特（Brian Merchant）指出，对于许多学生来说，人工智能已经成为“超大规模资本主义残酷的新面孔”。

“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. “如果我二十出头，失业，并且对未来的憧憬不仅仅是向大语言模型输入提示词，我也会对这场所谓的下一次工业革命的前景发出响亮的嘘声，”莫钱特写道。

Even when graduation speeches didn’t mention AI explicitly, “resilience” was a recurring theme this year. Schmidt himself acknowledged that 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.” 即使毕业演讲没有明确提到人工智能，“韧性”也是今年反复出现的主题。施密特本人也承认，你们这一代人存在一种恐惧：“未来已经被写定，机器正在逼近，工作岗位正在消失，气候正在恶化，政治正在分裂，而你们正在继承一个并非由你们造成的烂摊子。”

Caulfield, meanwhile, might also have misread her audience of arts and humanities graduates. One student said that before mentioning AI, Caulfield already started to lose them with her “generic” praise of corporate executives like Jeff Bezos. Another graduate, Alexander Rose Tyson, told The New York Times, “It wasn’t one person that really started the booing. It was just sort of like a collective, ‘This sucks.’” 与此同时，考尔菲德可能也误读了她面对的艺术和人文专业毕业生群体。一名学生表示，在提到人工智能之前，考尔菲德对杰夫·贝索斯（Jeff Bezos）等企业高管的“泛泛”赞美就已经让他们感到反感。另一位毕业生亚历山大·罗斯·泰森（Alexander Rose Tyson）告诉《纽约时报》：“并不是某一个人带头开始嘘的。这更像是一种集体的表达，意思是‘这太烂了’。”