Why Students Booed the AI Speakers

There is something a little sad about students booing commencement speakers.

Graduation ceremonies are supposed to be happy rituals. Families travel long distances. Parents sit in folding chairs under the sun, searching for their child in a sea of gowns and tassels. Young people stand on the edge of adulthood holding equal parts relief, fear, and possibility. For a few hours, everyone agrees to believe in the future together.

And then, at several American universities recently, came the boos. The speeches were not about war or elections. The speakers were talking about AI.

The easy interpretation is to dismiss the students as entitled, anti-technology, or unwilling to adapt. But I suspect something more serious was happening in those moments.

Many of these students are not hostile to AI. They use it every day. Some will likely build careers around it. They understand, perhaps better than older generations, how astonishing the technology really is. AI is already helping scientists discover new antibiotics, accelerating medical diagnostics, and solving problems that take human researchers years to untangle. There is real promise in that.

But technological progress and social anxiety are arriving together, braided into the same machine.

When executives stand on commencement stages speaking the language of innovation and opportunity, students hear something else beneath the optimism: the future they prepared for may no longer exist.

For decades, education operated on relatively stable logic. Study hard, develop expertise, earn credentials, and build a meaningful professional life. The details varied across countries and classes, but the broad social promise remained intact.

Now, many young people are looking at the world ahead and wondering whether the staircase they spent years climbing is dissolving beneath their feet. Entry-level legal work is changing. Software development is changing. Design, marketing, media, administration, tutoring, research, illustration, even parts of writing itself are changing almost monthly. Entire categories of cognitive labour are beginning to wobble when students are graduating into them.

I think the booing is coming from fear. And that fear is not irrational. But there is another layer to the anxiety surrounding AI, one that goes beyond jobs or even culture.

The industrial revolution eventually scattered machinery across factories, cities, and nations. But the AI revolution is unfolding differently. It is accumulating around enormous concentrations of capital, compute, data, and infrastructure. A handful of companies are increasingly mediating writing, search, communication, research, software development, creativity, and education.

This is not simply a new tool arriving in society but an infrastructure for cognition. And students sense, perhaps instinctively, what that means. The fear is not merely automation. It is dependency.

Previous empires controlled land, oil, shipping lanes, or trade routes. The emerging empires may control cognition itself: the systems through which people write, learn, communicate, design, organize knowledge, and understand the world.

And beneath the economic fear lies something even more difficult to articulate.

Many young artists, writers, filmmakers, musicians, and designers sense that we may be entering an era where culture becomes flattened. Not because machines will produce terrible work. In fact, much AI-generated work is already competent, polished, some even impressive. The deeper fear is that expression becomes frictionless and infinite: endless images, endless essays, endless music, endless content pouring into the world – like statistically optimized content slurry.

Human culture has always depended partly on limitation. Time, effort, skill, memory, failure, longing, obsession. A song mattered because someone spent years learning how to hear it before they could create it. A novel mattered because it represented an interior life patiently wrestled into language. Even bad art carried traces of a person trying to become more fully themselves.

The deeper fear is not that machines will produce bad art. It is that culture becomes so frictionless, abundant, and optimized that genuinely human voices become harder to recognize.

I do not think the students booing those speakers necessarily had all of this consciously in mind. But emotions often arrive before language does. Young people frequently sense historical shifts before institutions learn how to describe them.

And universities themselves now face an uncomfortable question: if intelligence becomes increasingly abundant and cheap, then what exactly is education for?

For a long time, schools and universities justified themselves primarily through economic utility. Better grades, better jobs, better salaries, better competitiveness. But if machines begin performing large amounts of procedural cognitive work, then education cannot remain merely a pipeline into labour markets.

Perhaps this is the moment education must recover older purposes: judgment, wisdom, ethical imagination, emotional depth, the ability to distinguish meaning from noise, the ability to remain human in a world increasingly organized around efficiency.

The students booing at commencement ceremonies may not fully understand the future any more than the speakers do.

None of us do.

But beneath the boos, the anxiety, and the awkwardness of those moments is a question much larger than artificial intelligence itself:

What becomes of a society when it cannot explain why human beings matter beyond their economic usefulness?