A lot has changed since 2015. That was, arguably, the last year where there was some optimism about the internet and social media as a force for good, when the fight for the now discarded notion of “net neutrality” was more than a quixotic tilting at windmills. Starting from 2016, with the Cambridge Analytica revelations, accusations of Big Tech subverting elections, people’s choices, and even the free market became commonplace. 2015 was also the last year Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t realise that what would have been, a decade ago, a pro forma speech from a titan of Silicon Valley at a University of Arizona convocation is now a provocation.

Schmidt’s speech at the University of Arizona on Sunday, in which he claimed to understand students’ “rational fear” around AI and “that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating”. He went on to say, though, that the future is unwritten and would be shaped by the young. His was the sort of speech that is applauded in conference rooms, summits, and shareholder meetings. The booing crowd, it seems, wasn’t in the mood for bulls**t.

About five days before........

© Indian Express