There he was, the man at the helm of innovation. Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google. The man who once said, google doesn't need to record your conversation, it already knows everything about you. Yet he didn't see this one coming. In his speech, he looked clear-eyed into the crowd of graduates and told them that AI is inevitable.

There was a group of people who will have a hard time joining the workforce. Companies keep using AI as the excuse for laying off workers. Dario keeps telling us by next year, AI will take over all jobs and there is nothing we can do. They will have nothing, and they better embrace it and be happy. Well, they will have a school loan, but that’s it.

If you were an external observer, maybe an alien watching humanity from a distance, you would think that AI is a new species that emerged from a lake and is taking over the world. You would never tell that the people spreading this fear are also the ones selling the tool that they swear will turn us all into gods. It's not just a capable tool that can be useful for coding, writing, and retrieving existing information.

No. It's the word itself. The all or nothing. The alpha and the omega. And it comes as a monthly subscription from a handful of companies.

What Mr Schmidt was saying to these graduates is that we are done innovating. Now we regurgitate. And then he was booed. He tried to keep talking but the boos were overwhelming. Somewhere between his words, he managed to say that being anti AI is akin to being anti immigrant, trying to score points. I don’t think it worked.

how eric felt

When I read the news, I first read through the transcript of his speech. It seemed as if he was able to go through his material. But I was wrong. Watching his performance on video was a whole other story.

There was a man, who had practiced his speech in front of a mirror, most likely with Gemini listening and providing feedback. It probably told him that his speech was brilliant. That it was grounded, and encouraging. "The kids will love it."

What he failed to see is that booing was not in the training data. No way Gemini was going to tell him that, because it is programmed to be agreeable and friendly. So yes, he was booed every time he mentioned AI.

But I think there is a lesson in innovation right there. AI learns from existing material. It can hardly deviate from what it already knows. When you ask it to come up with something new, it will show you something that seems new, because obviously you don't know all the material it was trained on. If it doesn't have the information, it can't tell you that it doesn't know. It will make it up instead.

But what these graduates did was exactly what differentiates people from the robots. They did something completely unexpected. They booed Eric Schmidt. They innovated. Something tells me that kids will be just fine. I may never be able to convince my mom to stop sharing AI videos, but my kids will learn to navigate it. They will continue to innovate. Maybe AI will be like a calculator for them. They will know how and when to use it for maximum benefit and prevent the psychosis altogether. It's never gonna be a replacement for thinking.

I was really happy to see the booing because it was the last thing they expected. Just a few days ago, the president of Glendale Community College was booed as well because she chose to have an AI read the graduates names and it butchered the process. AI is not inevitable. It's a nice addition. That’s it.

We don't just have to accept things as they come to us. The most valuable human quality in an age of automation is exactly what AI cannot provide: the ability to defy expectations, introduce chaos, and create truly original outcomes. That is precisely the power of human innovation.

For fun, I copied the commencement speech from a video and passed it through gemini, it complained about the grammar, but as I said earlier, it couldn't predict the outcome:

The emotional arc is clear: acknowledge fear → restore agency → define values → point toward possibility. It reads like something that wants to meet graduates where they actually are, rather than giving them generic optimism.

Then I asked it if it would result in booing:

What makes the speech work is that it does not say:

  • “everything will be fine,”
  • “stop worrying,”
  • or “technology is inherently good.”

Instead, it says:

  • the future is undecided,
  • humans remain morally responsible,
  • and participation matters.

That framing is resilient.

Not so resilient after all. Anyway, congrats to the 2026 graduates!