Or: How We Learned to Stop Pretending and Start Arguing with the Future
There’s a new ritual happening at college graduations.
Not the tossing of caps. Not the awkward family photos where someone’s uncle accidentally records twelve minutes of his own forehead.
No, this one is newer.
A commencement speaker says artificial intelligence… and the crowd boos.
Not polite disagreement. Not skeptical silence. Actual, theatrical booing—the same sound historically reserved for referees, villainous wrestling managers, and cable companies that charge a “regional sports fee” despite nobody in the household knowing what regional sport they supposedly support.
And honestly?
You can understand it.
The strange thing isn’t that students are booing AI.
The strange thing is that so many people seem surprised.
We spent years telling young people they were entering “the knowledge economy,” then quietly swapped the furniture while they were still paying tuition.
That tends to create some emotional turbulence.
The boos aimed at AI—and at speakers like former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—aren’t really about silicon chips or machine learning models. They’re not even entirely about jobs.
They’re about something older.
Control.
Or, more precisely, the uncomfortable feeling that control may have been greatly oversold.
Because if one defining political and cultural story emerges from 2026, it may not be AI itself.
It may be the backlash.
And that backlash is going to make corporate PR departments sweat through dress shirts at record-setting levels.
Not because AI is disappearing.
Because it isn’t.
And that’s the problem.
The Human Tradition of Booing Reality
Human beings have a long and proud history of booing things that later became unavoidable.
Electricity had critics.
Automobiles had critics.
The printing press had critics who were convinced books would destroy memory and create intellectual laziness—which, to be fair, sounds suspiciously similar to arguments currently being made about ChatGPT.
Every technological shift arrives with two traveling sales teams.
The first wears optimism like cologne.
They promise liberation, efficiency, and a glorious future where mundane work disappears and everyone becomes more creative.
The second team wears apocalypse.
They promise societal collapse, moral decay, and the end of civilization as we know it.
History suggests both groups are usually wrong in impressively symmetrical ways.
Technology rarely creates paradise.
It also rarely asks permission.
That’s what makes the current AI moment so psychologically combustible.
This isn’t merely another gadget.
Nobody fears losing employment to a toaster.
Nobody watches a refrigerator demo and thinks, Dear God, that appliance has career ambitions.
AI feels different because it doesn’t just automate motion.
It touches cognition.
And humans get nervous when machines start wandering into neighborhoods we previously considered ours.
Which brings us back to those commencement boos.
The easy interpretation is to dismiss graduates as naive or entitled.
That interpretation is also lazy.
Fear is not irrational when disruption is real.
The real question is what fear does next.
Because fear has two settings.
Alarm.
Or fuel.
The Employment Plot Twist Nobody Enjoys
For years, the social contract sounded straightforward.
Study hard.
Collect credentials.
Acquire skills.
Enter workforce.
Succeed.
It wasn’t perfect, but at least the script had continuity.
Now imagine graduating into headlines announcing layoffs, automation, AI copilots, autonomous agents, and companies openly discussing productivity gains tied to reduced labor needs.
That’s not abstract economics.
That’s existential weather.
And weather affects mood.
Particularly when tuition payments still exist.
There’s a peculiar cruelty to graduating during technological transition.
You spent years preparing for yesterday’s interview.
Then the interview changed.
Businesses today increasingly want AI-capable employees—not because executives wake each morning twirling metaphorical mustaches and plotting human obsolescence, but because productivity has become survival economics.
That reality makes many people uncomfortable.
Unfortunately, labor markets do not pause for emotional processing.
This creates a brutal tension.
A person may dislike AI for environmental concerns, labor concerns, misinformation concerns, or broader societal concerns.
Many of those concerns are legitimate.
But employers are typically hiring based on utility, not philosophical alignment.
A hiring manager rarely says:
“Remarkable résumé. Outstanding communication skills. Unfortunately, we discovered you oppose spreadsheets on moral grounds.”
They hire capability.
Always have.
And increasingly, AI literacy is drifting from optional skill toward baseline expectation.
Not universally.
Not instantly.
But noticeably.
This is the part many conversations avoid because it feels impolite.
Resistance and preparedness are not the same thing.
You can distrust a system while still learning how it works.
In fact, historically, the people most capable of shaping powerful systems are usually the ones who understand them best.
The critics who matter are informed critics.
The uninformed critics mostly become cautionary tales.
The Romantic Fantasy of Sitting This One Out
Some people still believe AI can be avoided.
Not criticized.
Avoided.
As though technological change functions like a questionable office potluck.
“No thank you. I’ll skip the AI.”
This fantasy deserves examination.
Because it’s surprisingly common.
Someone recently said they hoped to avoid learning AI for the remainder of their career.
Maybe they will.
People can sometimes outrun disruption for a while.
But hoping technological transformation politely bypasses your profession is a little like hoping inflation forgets your zip code.
Possible?
Perhaps.
Reliable?
Not especially.
And younger generations don’t really have that luxury.
Their professional lives are beginning inside the transition.
Which makes anti-AI identity politics particularly fascinating.
An “AI Hater” hat may feel emotionally satisfying.
It may communicate values, skepticism, or solidarity.
But identity and strategy are not interchangeable.
This distinction matters far beyond technology.
People do this constantly.
They confuse emotional positioning with practical preparation.
Politics.
Finance.
Health.
Work.
We announce allegiance to a feeling and quietly hope reality respects our branding.
Reality rarely checks merchandise.
That’s why Paul Roetzer’s observation lands with uncomfortable force.
Not because it’s cruel.
Because it’s practical.
A person who openly rejects AI during hiring conversations may discover employers are less interested in symbolic resistance than operational usefulness.
That doesn’t mean surrendering independent thought.
It means understanding the scoreboard.
The workplace is not asking:
“Do you love AI?”
It’s increasingly asking:
“Can you work with it?”
Those are radically different questions.
Why the Backlash Will Get Louder Before It Gets Smarter
Here’s where things become politically interesting.
The anti-AI movement is not going away.
If anything, it may become stronger.
Because backlash tends to follow acceleration.
And we are living through acceleration.
Trillions of dollars are pouring into AI infrastructure, models, chips, cloud ecosystems, and enterprise deployment.
Entire industries are reorganizing.
Markets are pricing AI not as novelty but as foundational infrastructure.
When money moves this aggressively, social tension usually follows.
That creates a narrow tightrope for corporations.
Too enthusiastic about AI?
You risk sounding gleefully indifferent to worker anxiety.
Too apologetic?
You appear unserious about innovation.
Corporate communications teams now face the delightful challenge of saying:
“We care deeply about people while simultaneously announcing software that reduces dependency on people.”
Good luck with that press release.
This is why 2026 feels culturally volatile.
Not because AI suddenly became controversial.
It already was.
But because controversy is moving from niche debate into public identity.
And once technology becomes identity politics, rational discussion often packs a suitcase and heads somewhere quieter.
The debate stops being:
How should we use this?
And becomes:
Which side are you on?
That shift makes nuance harder.
And nuance is exactly what we need.
Curiosity Is Not Surrender
Here’s the quiet irony underneath all this.
Learning AI does not require worshipping AI.
You can be skeptical and skilled.
Concerned and capable.
Critical and curious.
Society sometimes treats curiosity as betrayal.
It isn’t.
Curiosity is reconnaissance.
If someone worries about AI’s environmental impact, labor effects, misinformation risks, or broader economic consequences, the logical next step is not ignorance.
It’s literacy.
That’s why the suggested prompt feels more important than it first appears:
I do not like the impact of artificial intelligence on the environment, entry worker hiring rates, and many other factors. But I think I need to learn how to use it. Build me a 30-day program I can follow to learn how to use AI.
Notice what’s absent.
No ideological purity test.
No forced enthusiasm.
No requirement to become a LinkedIn prophet announcing that AI changed your life between breakfast and lunch.
Just practical learning.
And learning matters because technology debates often suffer from a peculiar imbalance:
The loudest opinions sometimes belong to people least familiar with the systems involved.
That’s not unique to AI.
It’s practically civilization’s favorite hobby.
But informed skepticism tends to produce better outcomes than theatrical rejection.
History repeatedly rewards people who understand disruptive tools well enough to influence how they evolve.
Not necessarily the earliest adopters.
Not the loudest cheerleaders.
But the interpreters.
The translators.
The people who refuse both blind devotion and blind dismissal.
The Boo and the Mirror
The graduates booing commencement speakers are not villains.
They’re mirrors.
Their reaction reflects something broader.
Anxiety about work.
About relevance.
About speed.
About whether institutions preparing young people actually understand the world awaiting them.
Those fears deserve acknowledgment.
But acknowledgment alone is not strategy.
And this may be the hardest truth inside the entire conversation:
The future does not become less disruptive because we dislike its arrival.
Booing may feel cathartic.
Sometimes catharsis is necessary.
But it remains a temporary emotional shelter, not a permanent address.
The more interesting story is what happens after the auditorium empties.
After the applause fades.
After the graduate removes the gown and faces Monday morning.
That’s where history usually gets written—not during the protest, but during the adaptation that follows it.
And maybe that’s why the boos matter.
Not because they signal rejection.
But because they reveal tension.
And tension, historically, is where learning begins.
The commencement speaker says “AI.”
The crowd boos.
Perhaps the deeper question is not whether the audience is right or wrong.
It’s whether, ten years from now, those same voices will remember the boo as resistance…
or as the sound they made before deciding to understand the thing that frightened them.