“Okay, I struck a chord,” Gloria Claufield said as she was being booed by a stadium full of humanities and art majors.
The University of Central Florida held their commencement ceremonies earlier in May. Graduation is supposed to feel hopeful. It is supposed to feel like the beginning of something stable: a career, a future, a life that you spend years working towards. Instead this moment left graduates, guests, and the internet with two dueling emotions. The graduates booed Caulfield when she declared, “The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution.” Her speech leaves you wondering: how does everyone else not get it?
This point in history marks the beginning of a social and economic collapse that people continue to market as innovation. A collapse where technology replaces workers while corporations celebrate “efficiency.” A collapse where data centers push lifelong residents of their communities, energy prices surge, artists have their work scraped without permission, algorithms replace human judgement, and deepfakes and AI-generated pornography are normalized before laws can even catch up to them.
In January of this year, Amazon announced a 16,000 employee layoff. In April, Meta fired 10 percent of its workforce by laying off 8,000 employees. Between May and July of 2025, Microsoft let go of 15,000 people. And last month, Oracle made between 20 and 30 thousand people leave because of AI doing a faster, cheaper job than they would.
Young people understand this instinctively because we are the ones expected to live in the world being built right now.
We are graduating into an economy where entry-level jobs are disappearing, creative industries are shrinking, and stable middle-class careers feel increasingly out of reach. We are told to adapt, retrain, learn to “work alongside AI,” while billionaires and tech giants make fortunes trying to rebrand the fact that human labor is becoming obsolete.
How do they not get it?
I have heard people compare artificial intelligence to a thneed from Dr. Suess’ The Lorax. If you are unfamiliar with the story, a thneed is marketed as something that can be everything. It can be a scarf, a hat, a purse, a mop, a tool, anything you need it to be. It can do it all. But in order to make it, every Truffula Tree has to be cut down.
This is exactly how they are marketing AI to us.
AI is being sold as the solution to every inconvenience imaginable. It can code, generate paintings, write essays, edit videos, do taxes, answer emails, teach children, replace customer service workers, simulate therapy sessions, and be your online companion. Everywhere you look, companies are trying to convince us that humans themselves are inefficient. That art takes too long. That thinking takes too long. That conversation takes too long. That people cost too much.
And just like the thneed, nobody wants to talk about what is being destroyed to make it possible.
The environmental cost alone is staggering. Massive data centers consume enormous amounts of water and electricity while surrounding communities deal with rising utility costs and environmental strain. The internet already feels overly saturated with AI-generated content, images, advertisements, articles, and videos that are designed not to inform or inspire but to endlessly produce content faster and cheaper.
How do they not get it?
The graduates booing during that speech understood something that many older executives and investors seem unable to grasp: technology is not inherently progress if it comes at the expense of human dignity.
The Industrial Revolution is often taught as a story of innovation and advancement, but for workers, it also meant exploitation, unsafe labor conditions, environmental destruction, child labor exploitation, and extreme wealth inequality. Workers had to fight for weekends, labor laws, fair pay, and safe working conditions because industrialists would not give those things willingly.
That is why comparing AI to the next Industrial Revolution is not comforting to many young people. It is a blaring red flag.
History has already shown us what happens when corporations embrace technological “progress” without valuing human life alongside it. During the Industrial Revolution, workers were forced into dangerous factories, children worked long hours, entire towns were controlled by companies, and laborers died fighting for basic protections. In Appalachia, coal miners literally took up arms during the Battle of Blair Mountain after years of exploitation, unsafe working conditions, starvation wages, and violent retaliation against union organizing. Workers understood something executives did not: when profit becomes more important than people, innovation stops being progress.
The students at UCF are inheriting a version of that same reality. They are watching corporations automate creative work, eliminate jobs, and centralize wealth while calling it advancement. They are being told that the future belongs to artificial intelligence when people are struggling to afford rent, healthcare, groceries, gas, and education. So when a commencement speaker compares AI to the Industrial Revolution, many young people do not hear optimism. They hear a speaker who is tone deaf to the realities of this so-called “progress.”
To a room full of artists, writers, musicians, designers, and humanitarians who are constantly being told that their passions are impractical while corporations simultaneously rush to automate and monetize creativity, how did Caulfield not get it?
I identify as progressive. I think many people in my generation would say the same. We believe in progress because we have seen what real progress looks like. The 20th century brought some of the most significant expansions of human rights in modern history: women gaining the right to vote, the Civil Rights Movement, labor protections, disability rights, gay rights, trans rights, abortion access, and broader conversations about bodily autonomy and human dignity. Progress happens when society becomes more humane. When people are allowed safety, freedom, rights, and a future.
That is why so many young people reject the idea that artificial intelligence automatically equals progress.
AI is technological advancement. Those are not the same thing.
Progress happens when people come before production. AI, as it currently exists, is centered almost entirely around production, faster content, fewer workers, higher profits, more automation, constant optimization. People are being treated as obstacles to efficiency instead of the reason society should advance in the first place.
AI is a product. People are progress.
That is what the graduates at UCF understood when they spoke out at their commencement speaker. We don’t reject innovation, creativity, or discovery. We are rejecting the idea that a future built around replacing human beings should automatically be celebrated because it is profitable.
This season’s graduates are not afraid of the future that we are inheriting. We are though afraid of being told that exploitation is inevitable as long as it is wrapped in the language of innovation.
Every generation is told in some way to simply shut up and accept the world as it is. To stop resisting. To adapt. To be realistic. But history only moves forward because ordinary people decide they deserve something better than the systems they inherited.
The students who booed during that commencement speech understood that instinctively.
Because a future where corporations own creativity, automation replaces livelihoods, and billionaires profit while everyone fights to survive is not progress. It is regression with better marketing.
And maybe the most hopeful thing about that graduation ceremony was hearing a generation loud enough to say no.