I’m reasonably certain that Schmidt anticipated that reaction after the first speaker was booed.
It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
It had the vibe of “These people need to hear the Truth”.
Schmidt anticipated the response, but does not understand it.
He falls flat on his face here precisely because "needing to hear the truth" is a self-contradiction. The very fact that he has to go around saying 'AI is inevitable, suck it up you live in our world now', proves that it's not true. Nothing that is actually inevitable is declared as such. Nobody goes to say "The sun will rise tomorrow!"
And this failure is pretty serious. The kids (and wider public) instinctively understand this dynamic even if Schmidt doesn't.
No matter how it's phrased, the only thing these kids will hear is "We are ruining your life", "We are taking everything from you".
It's all but inevitable than worryingly soon, some of them will go "Nothing to lose? Bet." and we will see far worse violence than the failed property damage against Sam Altman's house.
And in the specifics of military, it's all nonsense anyway. Reagan pulled it with his dumb space lasers and we ain't got those up there anymore.
The only time it was kind of true was with nuclear weapons between the US and USSR. Both countries very rapidly obtained enough weapons to destroy the other utterly, and were just wasting their money afterwards.
For the smaller states, nuclear weapons have universally been not worth it. The only two "losers" right now are Ukraine and Iran, neither of which would be in the position to use their nuclear weapons had they retained/obtained them.
Anyone who's paid attention to these recent wars has seen the actual military development be lower tech weapons. Cheap drones rather than million dollar missiles.
With regard to "AI weaponry": First, AI weapons are broadly a dumb idea. Second: As mentioned, nuclear weapons exist. AI isn't going to magically stop [insert western country] from obliterating China if China were to send their army of wunderwaffe robots.
March 30, 2026: https://thedefender.media/en/2026/03/fedorov-shared-info-abo...
> At the same time, the team is developing simulation and modelling environments for testing solutions, AI infrastructure for rapid system deployment, and tools that can be immediately integrated into military units.
So how are AI weapons a broadly dumb idea?
For a state like Ukraine, whether they retained their nuclear weapons is irrelevant; They'd never use them against Russia because the retaliation will always be more severe, whether they target Moscow directly or mere "tactical" use, Ukraine would lose the nuclear exchange.
And Russia hasn't used it's nukes despite Ukraine not having any nor being under anyone's nuclear umbrella. The threat of sanctions has (thus far) been sufficient.
If somebody visits a flat earther conference and says "you all need to accept the fact that the earth is not flat!" ... then this certainly doesn't prove that the earth is flat. I think you trip over your choice of words. If s/b in general has to go around saying that then your reasoning makes some sense. But if s/b in particular (like Schmidt) has to go around saying sth then this only proves that this particular person has some personal intention or feeling s/he wants to express. I couldn't care less why someone like Schmidt feels like that but I have my ideas. Maybe he just identifies with AI financially and ideologically and likes to provoke.
There's people who go around bothering flat earthers, but despite flat earthers claiming the contrary, they're quite small in number. No mass media effort, no corporate propaganda, no CEOs mentioning all the time.
The largest it ever got were things like the netflix shows. These are pretty illustrative; All of the big attention is not so much on "these people must be convinced of the roundedness of the planet" and more on the dissection of why these people refuse to accept something that is quite easy to prove across a wide variety of otherwise unconnected experiments.
However, the amount of money and energy spent on trying to convince people that “AI will take jobs”, by parties who would benefit from it, implies that these parties maybe don’t fully believe it, or believe that it needs to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
If I am certain that I am winning, I sure don’t need to yell it from mountain tops. Unless my winning depends on everyone believing it.
The court of public opinion has no such rules.
If we, the people, see a credible accusation against someone who seems like the type of person who might be guilty of it, we are free to call it like we see it.
Naturally, this can lead to problems: after all, who is "credible" and who "seems like they might be guilty" can be (and very much have been) subject to a lot of bigotry. This is why we have the rules we do in courts of law. But anyone trying to enforce actual legal court rules on public online discussions generally just ends up looking like a jerk.
Blame wealth for making the corruption of the courts too damn obvious. Now they’re not taken seriously.
If you’re so confident it’s a solid way to get ahead, please go ahead and try it yourself.
"So"? The fact that someone is alleged of rape and doesn't lose their invited speech is hardly evidence of injustice. Allegations are not convictions nor proof of guilt.
It seems you are against the presumption of innocence. This presumption is itself a cornerstone of justice, not the opposite.
This is not a legal forum. (In either the literal "this is an internet forum" sense, or the broader "place for discussion" sense.)
If you want to defend your techbro idols of charges far, far too many of their brethren are unquestionably guilty of, you're going to need a stronger argument than "you're not allowed to say you think he's guilty unless a court agrees with you!!"
I think the opposite is true. Accusing someone of rape is often very bad for the accused person, even if the claim is never substantiated. False rape accusations are defamatory.
The public documents said: “He followed me into a shower, slammed me against the wall, and forcibly raped me. I begged him to stop and cried out that he was hurting me, but he ignored my pleas. The next morning, Schmidt attempted to convince me that I enjoyed the assault.”
The point is that student activists handed out flyers about this in advance, so the crowd was aware.
And what exactly are we supposed to do? Just try to ship alternatives to big tech slop? Actively try to work against them? Publish cracked software so they stop earning money?
Genuinely asking, as I'm not sure sure indie developers are the ones who should try to work against these enormous corporations, it's typically the job of the government to ensure society works and is fair, but they seem to currently be on the side of big tech, so indie developers can't realistically do anything about it, unless I'm missing what you're asking for here.
But now that we have essentially "boilerplate for free", I hope the degoogle/demeta/etc and self-hosted efforts are boosted in a way that even my mom can migrate away without much trouble. But that'll probably take real AI and not slop based addiction machines.
I love self-hosting, been doing it myself for quite some time already, and also notice a slight uptick among friends and acquaintances also interested in the same. When it comes to businesses, the ones that didn't already host their data in Europe/EU, are now desperately moving the data, but almost none of them go on-prem/self-hosted, for the typical reasons.
So, while there is a slight uptick, I'm not sure this is the "local stacks" moment, and also not sure that's actually what the public wants. I sometimes dream of setting up a company basically focused on helping people do more self-hosting in various ways, but after looking into it more, I always end up with the feeling that people typically don't actually want self-hosting, most people don't seem to care where the data lives. That'd be such a dream business though, so it's hard to let go of the idea :)
There was a time in which they deserved some respect, as a result of free exchange of ideas among intellectuals. That's far behind by now.
Yes I’d say this is more than representative of “every person” sentiment.