"But it happened."

A must-watch video from Casey Muratori reflecting on the commencement speech where Eric Schmidt, founder of Google, was booed when encouraging students to adopt AI.

This is a case where he had direct decision-making authority during the time period when the very worst most dystopian parts of the technology business model were developed, perfected and entrenched.

He is giving this commencement speech to a group of students who have known nothing but that their whole lives. They're not like me. They didn't know a time before all of this. They didn't experience technology in the 80s or something like this. So all they know is the dark pattern version. All they know is the one where they don't own anything and their data is kept by other people and their behavior is tracked and their data is sold and they are targeted for advertising. That's what they know about technology. That's what technology is like for them and only that.

Eric Schmidt, one of the primary architects, is now looking them in the eye with a straight face and saying, "You should be enthusiastic about the next new wave of technology. You should want to be in the room and make decisions about how that new technology will go. And you should bring your humanity with you and your good judgment about how we can do things in a way that will benefit all of us and be good for all of us."

Well, yeah, but why didn't Eric Schmidt do any of that? He just said in the first part of the commencement speech that there were all these really bad things that happened on his watch and he was in the rooms the entire time. He was in one of the most important rooms where these decisions were being made and he either didn't want to or couldn't stop any of that from happening.

So if he wanted to pass on something valuable to these students... well, that would have been the thing. It would have been the introspection of what went wrong. Why did he fail? Why did he say "okay" to building this very bad aspect of technology on top of the useful tool? The parts that we all think are actually good. Why didn't he stop that part? Why doesn't he take some responsibility for it?

If you are gonna take credit (and win capitalism) for building Google, you gotta take credit for all of it. Looking back in 2026, was the invention of Google a net-positive for society? How about Microsoft, or Apple, or Meta?

(Props also for the excellent Tim Robinson reference, which captures the essence of what's going on here.)