Washington: For years, American commencement (convocation) speakers could safely rely on formulaic speeches involving inspirational cliches, autobiographical struggles, and exhortations to new graduates to “dream big” and not fear failure. In 2026, there’s a new guard rail: mention artificial intelligence at your own risk.Across the United States this commencement season, graduation ceremony speakers invoking AI have been greeted not with polite applause but with boos and jeers. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was heckled at the University of Arizona after telling graduates they would help shape AI’s future – an argument that landed awkwardly among students staring into a difficult job market increasingly populated by automation, layoffs and hiring freezes.At the University of Central Florida, graduates booed when real estate executive Gloria Caulfield declared that “the rise of AI is the next industrial revolution.” The reaction was immediate enough for the startled speaker to ask, “What happened?” before gamely attempting to continue. At Middle Tennessee State University, music executive Scott Borchetta also drew boos while speaking about AI’s impact on creative industries. Instead of optimism, many graduates heard something closer to: “Congratulations, your replacement is scalable.”The heckling is more than campus theater. It reflects a broader American backlash against a technological order increasingly viewed as enriching billionaires while unsettling everyone else. While elites promise growth and abundance, young grads (and their dads and moms) are worrying about electricity bills, water supplies, and disappearing entry-level jobs. The anger is now spilling beyond campuses into suburbia, farmland, and zoning-board meetings — especially around data centers, the vast warehouse-like facilities powering the AI boom. Just outside Washington DC in Northern Virginia, nicknamed “Data Center Alley,” residents are battling proposed server farms over noise, power use, land consumption and environmental impact. Similar agitation has spread through Georgia, Arizona, Oregon, Texas, and New Jersey.It’s become such a hot-button subject that President Trump himself faced questions on it Wednesday, only for him to insist that “AI has been AMAZING, because right now we have more jobs, more people working right now in the United States by FAR, than we ever had before,” before quickly pivoting to Iran. The billionaire class — from chipmakers to cloud providers to venture capitalists — has promoted AI as the next transformative leap in human productivity. They are not entirely wrong. AI promises medical breakthroughs, faster scientific research, personalized education, improved logistics, greater efficiency, and potentially trillions in economic output. “AI is there and in many areas it is smarter than humans. We have to get used to the idea that it will replace humans in many domains,” says Prof Lil Mohan, who teaches a course on Artificial Intelligence at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business.Yet critics argue that the gains are unevenly distributed. A graduate entering journalism, design, software engineering, law, marketing, or customer support now hears simultaneously that AI will create extraordinary productivity gains — and that entry-level work may shrink because software can draft memos, generate code, summarize documents, or design graphics.Residents near proposed data centers meanwhile hear promises of innovation and tax revenue, but sometimes see rising energy demand, heavy water consumption, industrialized landscapes, and relatively modest permanent job creation. Public skepticism toward AI has risen as communities question whether technological acceleration is outrunning democratic consent. “It’s a very natural response of the graduating class because there is some small truth to the decline in entry level jobs,” says Aditya Balu, who graduated from Johns Hopkins University in 2019 and is now an operations analyst in an AI unit at the World Bank., “Eventually everyone will have have to suck it up and upskill on AI because it will result in phenomenal advances.” Yet the story is not simply AI-optimism or techno-pessimism. History also carries a warning often omitted from Silicon Valley keynote speeches: transitions hurt. They redistribute power. They create winners and losers. And when ordinary people believe the billionaire class captures most of the upside while communities absorb the disruptions, anger follows.Which may explain why America’s graduates are booing.
