If you’re set to give a university commencement address in the near future—and I know some of you are—here’s a PC Gamer tip: don’t hype up AI. Turns out modern grads just don’t want to hear your paeans to LLMs, whether you’re the real estate exec who got heckles for calling AI “the next industrial revolution” or ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who drew loud boos when he sang hosannahs to how AI is surely going to transform every aspect of our lives.
Instead, you should probably try to be more like Steve Wozniak (a universally applicable bit of advice). The creator of the OG Apple I managed to make history again when he became perhaps the first commencement speech-giver to bring up AI and get a positive response. How? By remembering he was talking to smart, driven people with potential, not a roundtable of shareholders.
“AI is the big term today,” Wozniak said at a May 2 commencement speech at Grand Valley State University. “[It would] take an hour to talk about AI fully, but you all have AI!” Cue the bated breath, the preloaded boos, the fear that the Woz—a rather well-liked chap, renowned for being the nice yin to Steve Jobs’ nasty yang—was about to put his foot in his mouth.
“You all have AI,” he repeated, “actual intelligence!” And relax. The applause arrived quickly, and then Wozniak started pretty much making fun of the likes of Sam Altman and their great quests to create a truly artificial mind.
“My entire life in the technical world, I’ve been following people that were trying to figure out how to make a brain,” said Wozniak. “Software or hardware?” Wozniak said they eventually cracked it.
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“I was at a company where the engineers figured out how to make a brain,” said the Apple co-founder, now fully in his ‘tight five’ mode, “It takes nine months.”
Which is a pretty good bit, I must say, and got the laughs it deserved. “The day you die,” he continued, “you’re not gonna remember things you learned in your class, formulas and all that, what you’re gonna remember is the good times you had doing things with other people, enjoying anything in life.” Pretty funny that it takes one of computing’s most famous tech guys to remember that it’s actually people that are truly important.
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