OrlandoSomeone yelled “AI sucks!” at the University of Central Florida’s humanities commencement.
A speaker called AI “the next industrial revolution” and the crowd erupted in boos.
The university has not commented on the choice of speaker.
Sources: 404 Media
THE LUDDITE MISREADING
The Luddites of 1811-1816 were skilled English textile workers — not technophobes. They smashed power looms because the machines let unskilled labor produce inferior cloth at lower wages, destroying a craft economy. They understood the technology fine; they objected to who captured its gains.
WHAT THE FIRST INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION ACTUALLY DID
Engels documented English textile towns in the 1840s: child mortality above 50% in Manchester, life expectancy of 17 in working-class districts, wages stagnant for roughly 50 years even as output multiplied. The aggregate gains were real; the human cost across two generations was the price.
WHY HUMANITIES STUDENTS
Studies of generative AI exposure consistently rank writing, translation, legal analysis, journalism, and editorial work at the top of the displacement curve. Manual trades — plumbing, electrical, construction — sit at the bottom. The first wave of automation hits the credential class that historically assumed it was safe.
THE COMMENCEMENT SPEAKER PATTERN
American commencement speeches have always been ideological battlegrounds — Solzhenitsyn at Harvard in 1978, Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005, the regular protests over Henry Kissinger. A booed speaker is the genre working as designed, not malfunctioning.
THE TRANSITION PROBLEM
Economists distinguish long-run gains (real, eventual) from transition costs (also real, borne by specific people in specific decades). When a speaker invokes the Industrial Revolution as inspiration, the humanities audience hears the 60-year wage stagnation, not the 1950s prosperity that came a century later.