Why College Graduates—And Pope Leo—See Through the AI Sales Pitch

Perhaps former Google CEO Eric Schmidt should have known better than to glorify the AI revolution in front of its intended victims, but he didn’t. When he recently went before the graduating class at the University of Arizona to praise the “architects of artificial intelligence” he was booed. When he went on to try to dismiss the “fear” that AI inspires in just about everyone but its architects as an artifact of social media engagement algorithms, the boos grew louder. They reached their crescendo, however, when he urged the audience to seize their “agency” to build the AI future in workplaces throughout the country, where, he said AI was “inevitably” going to transform everything, whether the students liked it or not. He apparently did not notice the contradiction in urging student to use their agency to build an inevitable future, but the students caught it.

He was not alone in failing to read the room. When Gloria Caulfeld of the Tavistock Development Corporation said at the graduation ceremony at the University of South Florida that the rise of AI was the next industrial revolution, the boos from the students drowned her out completely. She burst out in total surprise, “Whew! What happened? OK. I struck a chord.” And when she added that only a few years ago AI was not a factor in our lives, the students applauded vigorously.

At the graduation ceremony at Middle Tennessee State University, Scott Borchetta, the infamous record executive who sold off Taylor Swift’s masters to Scooter Braun without giving her a fair chance to buy them, was booed when he said AI was “rewriting production as we sit here.” His unthinking response was, “Deal with it; it’s a tool.” When the boos continued, he said with a smug smile, “You can hear me now or pay me later.”

Schmidt called for the graduating class to exercise their agency in shaping the coming AI future, but his audience just didn’t believe him. That’s because they have heard too many other business leaders reveal their true plans for the use of AI. Did Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei think no one was listening except investors when he boasted to Axios in 2025 that his technology would “could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years”? Perhaps Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman thought no college students would read his gleeful prediction in a 2026 interview with the Financial Times that “…white-collar work where you're sitting down at a computer, either being a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person, most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.”

These predictions might just be self-serving marketing hype from tech companies hoping to build investor confidence, but the consulting world seems to agree. In March of this year, Goldman Sachs said that AI can potentially automate tasks that account for 25% of all work hours, including 44% of legal tasks, 35% of business and financial operations, and 32% of all management tasks.

Apparently, AI-related job cuts are not just something that might happen in the future. US companies announced over 300,000 job cuts through April of this year and the most commonly cited reason was AI. In March, the financial technology company Block said it was cutting 40 percent of its work force in anticipation of using AI to replace them.

Analysts including Molly Kinder at Brookings have been warning for well over a year now that companies are cutting back on hiring junior workers fresh out of college in favor of requiring senior staff to use AI tools, a practice that might be individually rational for each company but imperils the career ladder that creates the skilled senior staff that companies will need in the future.

Business and financial executives are explicit about their plans to replace workers with AI. In a recent press conference in Hong Kong Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters announced a plan to reduce its workforce by 15% by 2030. Then, apparently forgetting that his audience was not just the financial industry reporters in the room, he explained the rationale as: “It is replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in.”

Many, including JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon, tried to condemn the tone-deaf choice of words—“lower-value human capital”—without rejecting the underlying economic logic, as if it would make made a difference to the those who would be let go whether they are described as “workers”, “employees”, “personnel”, “human resources”, or “human capital”. The key point, revealed to the entire world in these comments, is that business leaders are looking for ways to get the same job done with fewer workers and they look at AI as the latest tool that will enable them to do this.

Today’s college graduates face a tough job market. Many blame AI because they have been told that’s the reason. And it is true that the unemployment rate for recent college graduates, while still below the rate for other young workers, is higher now than it has been historically. But it began to exceed the general unemployment rate in March 2022, which was before the advent of ChatGPT in November 2022. Something else is going on in the job market for recent college graduates other than AI and no one is quite sure what. Companies are almost certainly engaged in “AI washing” as they slash payrolls, reduce new hires, and seek to blame a new technology for their cost cutting measures.

It might be reassuring to college graduates, then, to realize that much of the noise about AI and the future of work is just wishful thinking on the part of the tech elite and their business customers. AI is going to change jobs but it might not be the job destroyer many think or hope it will be. As AI researchers Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor say, AI is just a normal technology that will be integrated into the business world gradually as managers figure out how to redesign workflows to take advantage of the strengths and limitations of the new software. Everyone is going to have to adjust, but AI is not going to change everything overnight. And some hoped-for productivity gains won’t materialize, as Uber is apparently realizing after blowing through its AI budget for the year without experiencing corresponding increases in “useful consumer features.” The bigger danger to employment in the near future might be an economic crisis as the AI bubble bursts and overextended tech companies retrench, go bankrupt or are acquired by more established firms.

But none of this has penetrated the impervious-to-reality San Francisco consensus recently described by New York Times tech reporter Jasmine Sun. In this world-view, artificial general intelligence is nigh and will soon eliminate the need for human labor, leaving the San Francisco elite of AI researchers, engineers, venture capitalists, founders and managers at the top of the economic pyramid and the rest of the population as a permanent impoverished underclass. According to this report, the tech elites are ok with that outcome, except if it affects them personally or if political upheaval prevents them from making any money.

Its adherents seem oblivious to how this outlook appears to the rest of the world. Do they think no college students read the New York Times? It beggars belief that they can share their hope for economic domination over an impoverished population with a tech reporter and then send their messengers to college campuses preaching the gospel of AI empowerment and agency. It is as if they think that no one has overheard their oft-expressed desire to use AI to transcend human limitations and leave the biological human race behind.

China is routinely excoriated in the US as an authoritarian state sacrificing its people for the good of the party. But three courts in China have now ruled that AI cannot be used to eliminate jobs, and all consumer-facing generative AI systems have to be approved by a government agency before they can be offered to the public in China. In contrast, US President Donald Trump recently postponed signing an executive order that would have provided for a voluntary pre-deployment review of AI models on the grounds that checking for cybersecurity risks could impede AI innovation. And his administration has sought to prevent states from regulating AI as well. In the face of this consequences-be-dammed attitude toward AI from US business and political leaders, it should not be a surprise that almost two-thirds of Americans (64%) expect AI to lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years and that 87 percent of Chinese express confidence in AI, compared with just 32 percent in the US.

In his recently released Encyclical Letter, Magnifica Humanitas, His Holiness Pope Leo XIV effectively laid out a comprehensive ethical approach to regulating AI, including condemnations of transhumanist and posthumanist impulses that drive the tech elite. It should be required reading for US leaders. In connection with AI and the future of work, the Pope urged business leaders to include the quality and dignity of work among their “indicators of success.” And he warned that “the pursuit of greater profits cannot justify choices that systematically sacrifice jobs.” He also urged a government role to ensure that the introduction of AI into the workplace “should be accompanied by verifiable measures to protect the employment, retraining and participation of workers” and to “make continuous training and professional transitions accessible to all.” Without these measures, the Pope concluded, AI innovation will threaten the dignity of work.

It is transparently obvious that US business leaders and policymakers have failed to take these steps. Indeed, in thought, word and deed they have indicated an intention to dispense with as many workers as possible and some of them openly seek to ascend to a higher sphere where they are transformed into a new immortal species and leave the rest of humanity behind. What students throughout the country are saying to these leaders who appear before them to sing the praises of AI is clear enough: the introduction of AI into the workplace as currently conceived and practiced in the major US business and financial enterprises is not an advance in human welfare. It is, in the words of Pope Leo, “an accelerator of injustice.”