Of Course They Booed

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Every spring, we get a flood of stories about college graduation ceremonies -- typically full of tut-tutting about inappropriate behavior or inappropriate speech -- always presented as synecdochical of all of higher ed. Oh sure sure, there’s often the odd tale of triumph: someone’s service dog gets a diploma; someone in their 70s finishes medical school. But mostly these stories serve to reinforce other, more dour narratives about college students -- unprepared, entitled, intolerant -- and about college itself -- irreverent, irrelevant.<br>This year, despite a brief attempt to gin up controversy surrounding NYU’s selection of Jonathan Haidt as its commencement speaker – sigh, yet another tale of "the coddling of the American mind" – the coverage has focused on the chorus of boos whenever speakers heralded this glorious "AI" future students are poised to step into.<br>And perhaps it’s a little ironic that this graduating class, a group that we've been told time and time again has spent the last four years using ChatGPT to cheat their way through college, would display such sour sentiment towards "AI." But as most commencement speakers seem duty-bound to repeat, graduation marks the entry into adulthood; it is "the beginning of your life"; "the future is now" – that sort of thing. And just these students are now officially adults, they’re being told a very different story: that there really is no future. There are no jobs. And whatever thing they might have learned to do or learned to love in college, whatever career they might have believed they were preparing for, "AI" is going to destroy all of that.<br>No wonder they boo.<br>Here these young people are, having just done everything they were told to do to be successful. They got good grades in high school. They did all the extracurriculars. They scored sufficiently well on the SATs. They were admitted into college – maybe not their first choice, but they got in somewhere, and dammit, they stuck it out for four maybe five years. They completed all the coursework, sat through all the Zoom lectures and the in-person lectures and through all the AI-proctored and in-person exams. They checked all the digital boxes, submitted their homework through the LMS portal's plagiarism-checker, responded to at least two classmates posts on the LMS discussion boards. They used "AI," fine sure but fuck it, because the technology sure used them too. They handed key decisions over to algorithms – not just what YouTube videos to watch while they scrolled through the digital textbooks but what courses to take so that the whole effort of the degree was manageable. Because along the way, the majority of them also worked at one or more jobs; and the majority of them went into debt.<br>They were promised that if they did all this, if they received a bachelor's degree, then they'd be able to get a good job and make a decent living to support themselves and support their families. But now, even before their diplomas are in hand, they're discovering that the promise was a lie. There aren't any jobs for college graduates, they're being told. All this is supposedly thanks to "AI," a technology that these students know probably better than any other group out there, churns out the most laughably banal bullshit.<br>The whole "digital natives" trope is undoubtably hogwash -- the ridiculous idea that young people, by virtue of being born into a world of computational machinery are more adept at its manipulation. These students have spent their whole lives being taught, cajoled, entertained, and surveilled by computers and algorithms -- in and out of the classroom. (But importantly, in.) But they recognize now -- if they hadn't already -- as rejection letter after rejection letter hits their email inbox, that they're being spurned by this same machinery that they’re supposedly most in tune with. “Those who live by electronics, die by electronics. Sic semper tyrannis,” as Kurt Vonnegut wrote in Player Piano -- not really a message you want to hear on graduation day, a ritual that’s meant to mark beginnings and possibilities. But nor do you want to hear someone hyping the very technology that has just sent you some stale, autogenerated text denying you yet another job interview.<br>All mention of “AI” does is remind them of the political economy from which this monstrous extractive machine has emerged, remind them that their options and their opportunities appear to be utterly foreclosed.<br>They have no choice. They have no agency. They must comply. The future is written, these smug (and affluent) "AI" boosting graduation speakers have the audacity to tell these students. Just suck it up. Deal with it.<br>It's this sneering attitude, I'd argue, that is driving so much of the pushback against "AI" and against ed-tech -- it’s Cory Doctorow’s “enshittification” plus a lot of infantilization. People are sick of being told that these technologies are inevitable, particularly when...