New episode of This Week in Tech: This Week in Tech #1089 (TWiT) — "Robot Butt Crack "
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Listen/watch: This Week in Tech: Robot Butt Crack
Published: 2026-06-22T02:45:47Z
#TWiT #Podcast #Tech
I was a bit taken aback by Doc Rocks assertion that the only reason college kids are booing some of the commencement speakers is because they can’t get their RAM or high-end GPU. That seems to be an overly shallow and cynical interpretation, not to mention making the assumption that it’s the gamers who have the problem. And to then propose that the wait forward is simply for them to learn AI seems really tone deaf to the reality of the day.
College graduates today face some pretty stark prospects due to so many companies thinking they can replace workers with AI. And they know that. Booing Eric Schmidt because he’s part of the crowd that is helping put them out of work seems imminently reasonable to me.
Yes, they have invested a lot of time, and in some countries, a lot of money to get an education, only to be told they are saps and they should have gone straight into the workforce, while they had the chance, because now the jobs they trained for are disappearing.
Although with the increasing prices of AI and companies now having to pay for what they actually use, we might see a swing back the other way, with people being taken on for some of the work and AI being relegated to specialist tasks they are good at, instead of completely replacing workers, so those leaving university will have more opportunities going forward, because it is cheaper for a company to employ them than to use an AI for everything.
E.g. using the AI to get the general outline of a project, the human does the detail work and a Mythos type model does a security check, before the code is released.
By the way, they weren’t saps. That education is what will distinguish them in the workforce more and more. Knowing how to think, and how to learn, are the most valuable skills of all. Even more valuable in the age of auto-content/auto-coding.
Yes, but the message from the commencement speakers gave them the impression that they have wasted their time, employers are “hiring” AI instead of graduates.
Hopefully, as the real probe of AI starts to come out, there will be a reversal and people will be employed and the AI relegated to helping them, where it is actually useful.
This has been a recurring topic in recent weeks across multiple show (TWIT and Security Now) “Why are people upset with AI?” I thought this article provided a good cross section of answers to this very question.
[Moderator note: this article is paywalled. If possible, please provide “gift links” when submitting here so everyone can enjoy what you did, and are better able to understand your point of view.]
https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2026/08/why-americans-fear-the-ai-future/
I think its also funny that when the tech industry looks at this question, it frequently comes back looking like this classic Simpsons quote “Could it be me?”
For a non-paywalled version of this good article, try this:
https://archive.is/20260611235052/https://www.nationalreview.com/magazine/2026/08/why-americans-fear-the-ai-future/
