The booing that almost drove Eric Schmidt off that commencement stage when he tried to push AI should be a reminder that there are pretty much no other issues, short of hatred of child abuse, that cut across political lines more dramatically than the growing anger and pushback against Big Tech AI systems being forced on us, their associated data centers, and the politicians who support them.
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This. Billionaires should not exist. At the very least, that would be a good start.
https://mastodon.social/@justcameheretosay/116585936313016977
@lauren
Please post a link. I want to enjoy it too 👉👈🥺
@lauren Everyone over 10 knows that something like Skynet would be a threat to the 98%.
@lauren Probably worth noting that Schmidt is facing allegations of rape, domestic abuse, spying, and corporate retaliation by his ex-girlfriend (https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2026-03-06/former-google-chiefs-spying-sex-assault-lawsuit-sent-to-arbitration), so his support for AI is probably the least of my concerns regarding the man.
And this isn’t the first or only allegations of him being a gross creep either.
@lauren Ha, best news yet today, hadn't seen that story. Hopefully these folks will start getting a clue.
In an interview with Chris Hayes, Derek Thompson points out that the vast wealth of the fossil fuel industry is being poured into AI to concentrate power into the hands of a very few billionaires.
Does anyone want to be a vassal to #PrinceBonesaw or his capo Musk ?
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/business/xai-humain-saudi-musk-spacex.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/27/technology/saudi-arabia-ai-exporter.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/19/technology/saudi-arabia-elon-musk-xai.html
Or illiterate peasantry ruled by Koch's alliance of fossil fuel bigots?
https://www.desmog.com/2025/12/11/the-koch-network-is-pushing-trump-to-accelerate-ai-documents-show/
https://jacobin.com/2018/06/public-education-privatization-koch-brothers-teachers
@lauren So many of my fellow faculty think students are cheating left and right but so many students keep telling us how much they loathe AI. Not all of them, but most of them. While there’s a lot to worry about from techbros, I think our students are largely on to the con.
@lauren@laurenweinstein.org The truly incredible part is that if ML progress had continued to be pushed forward at the pace of better medicines and energy efficiency breakthroughs, it would have been nothing but celebration.
And yet.
@slightlyoff It's worse than that. The understandable hatred of the horrific LLM systems being foisted on us is causing potentially beneficial AI applications to increasingly become collateral damage.
@lauren ...and that's before discussing the layoffs and capital misallocation. Real "hat-trick of value destruction" stuff.
