AI's PR Problem (Updated)

This is just a brief post to explain to my old boss, Eric Schmidt, why he and his ilk are getting booed at college commencements, and why laws against data centers are getting passed. The explanation is below the fold.

Let us start from an under-appreciated fact. Paul Campos reports that:

The college wage premium, that is, the increased earnings associated with having a college degree as opposed to only being a high school graduate, hasn’t changed at all in the past 25 years, because median real wages have been flat as a pancake for everybody, no matter what their formal education level, for the past quarter century.

But:

I wonder what’s happened to capital over this time? Value of S & P 500, inflation-adjusted, 1/2000 to 9/2025 (same period as the wage data):

2000: $1,394

2025: $6,688

On average, for more than the students' entire lives, stock-owners like Schmidt and (to a much lesser extent) I have stolen every last drop of the productivity increase of US workers at every age and education level. (See the actual numbers in the appendix)

Now, the perpetrators of this theft are telling their victims, the students and the public at large, that whether they like it or not they will be subjected to AI because that will make the perpetrators even richer. The victims have been informed that this new technology will:

• Nudify their images.

• Leak their passwords.

• Increase their utility bills.

• Consume their scarce water resources.

• Coerce state and local governments into providing many billions of dollars a year in tax breaks.

• Force them to invest their 401Ks and index funds in an obvious bubble.

• Eventually require a taxpayer bailout.

• Eliminate their jobs.

• Render their expensively acquired skills worthless.

• Be so expensive that only the rich can use it.

• Destroy democracy.

• Accelerate global warming.

• Encourage them to commit murder and suicide.

• Autonomously target them with drones.

• Possibly even end humanity.

• Add glue to their pizza.

Nothing better illustrates the contempt of the Epstein class for the proletariat than that these oligarchs would expect the graduating class to enthusiastically accept this prospect.

Appendix

Here are the actual numbers from Paul Campos' 25 years of flat wages and no increase in the college wage premium, while value of capital has skyrocketed:

I was fooling around with FRED this morning, as one does, and here are some stats: (The FRED numbers are presented in nominal dollars; I’ve converted them to CPI-adjusted dollars).

Median usual weekly earnings of workers with a high school degree only:

2000: $968

2025: $980

Median usual weekly earnings of workers with a bachelor degree only:

2000: $1,587

2025: $1,580

...

Median usual weekly earnings of people with a bachelor’s degree or higher:

2000: $1,705

2025: $1,747

Here is a short list of YouTube videos on this topic:

• Kasia Baba's must watch Boomers just cannot grasp why we do not like AI

• Vanessa Wingårdh's Nobody Actually Wants AI Anymore

• Taylor Lorenz' You Are About to Become Economically Worthless

• Sam Seder's Everyone Is Fed Up With Tech's Ai BS

• Silicon Money's Why Tech CEOs Are Quietly Cancelling Their AI Plans

• The Rational National's Heartwarming: Gen-Z Hates Ai

As a boomer, I think this post might be the exception that proves Ms. Baba's rule.

Note that every single one of the ads that I saw watching these videos in an incognito window was advertising an AI company! As are 49% of all the billboards in the Bay Area. Read the room, guys!

Update 25th June 2026

In Why Does Everyone Hate AI?, Paul Krugman reinforces my point with actual data: He starts where I did:

Eric Schmidt, the ex-CEO of Google, recently gave a commencement speech in which he heralded the coming of AI — and was loudly booed by the students. This was not an outlier. There have been a number of similar incidents lately, evidence that many people now really hate AI.

Are we talking about a vocal but unrepresentative minority? No. A recent Pew survey found that American adults believe by a wide margin that AI will be negative for society and, by a smaller margin, that it will be bad for them personally:

Krugman goes on to pose a number of reasons for this PR fiasco.First because:

we fear that AI will do terrible things because the companies selling it told us it would do terrible things. Last year, for example, Anthropic CEO Darius Amodei declared in an interview with Axios that AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs and drive overall unemployment as high as 20 percent within 1 to 5 years.

He points out that these negative views were not present at the advent of the Internet nor at the rise of social media.

Second:

many ordinary people view AI negatively because they feel that it is being forced on them.

It’s true that many people are voluntarily using large language models for personal convenience or as a business productivity tool. But a significant part of AI use isn’t voluntary. This Wall Street Journal headline from February says it all:

Why are companies doing this? Presumably they believe that AI will raise productivity. But just as importantly, they’re responding to pressure from financial markets, which are rewarding companies for quickly adopting AI, apparently without regard to demonstrated results.

And while Americans workers are being dragooned into using AI, American consumers are being force-fed AI whether they want it or not. Most dramatically, Google has replaced its search engine with AI, without offering the option to opt out. One has to turn to obscure workarounds or third-party sites to get traditional search results.

So many people feel, rightly, that they aren’t being allowed to choose whether to use AI — not using AI has become hard both as a worker and as a consumer.

Third because:

datacenters are a highly visible reminder of AI’s costs. Datacenters occupy huge tracts of land — one proposed site in Utah will be twice the size of Manhattan. They guzzle electricity and water. When they generate some of their own power, they create major local pollution. Not surprisingly, there is intense opposition to datacenter construction. According to a Reuters Ipsos poll, 57 percent of Americans — two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans — would oppose a datacenter in their neighborhood. Only 14 percent would support one.

The Utah data center proposal is definitely toxic. Finya Swai reports that Data center controversy unseats powerful Utah lawmaker:

A massive data center project in Box Elder County, Utah, helped bring down the state’s Senate president, who lost his GOP primary on Tuesday after his support for the controversial development fueled voter backlash.

Stuart Adams, one of Utah’s most powerful politicians and the longest-serving president of the state Senate in its history, lost to challenger Stephanie Hollist, a former university lawyer and vocal opponent of the data center.

Hollist accused Adams, as well as the state’s broader political establishment, of ignoring public concerns about a Stratos data center project that critics feared could cause serious environmental harms.

...

Box Elder County Commissioners Boyd Bingham and Lee Perry, who voted in favor of allowing the plans to continue, also lost their primary elections.

Fourth because:

even before the advent of AI, tech companies had lost the public’s trust. Over the years Pew has regularly surveyed the public for its views on technology companies, asking whether they have a positive or a negative effect “on the way things are going.” In 2015 public opinion of tech companies was overwhelmingly positive. By 2022, the year ChatGPT was released, that goodwill had evaporated.

Why have Americans turned on tech companies? While it surely reflects growing awareness of the psychological and societal harm done by social media, much of it also reflects the enshittification of tech products.

Fifth because:

AI is tightly linked in the public mind with the tech oligarchs who are pushing it. There is widespread awareness of the growing concentration of wealth and power at the top and how this is distorting our politics and harming our society. Aside from the MAGA faithful, Americans overwhelmingly favor government policies to reduce wealth inequality:

And AI is widely perceived, for good reason, as a technology that will increase the concentration of wealth at the top. Indeed, as I said, the AI companies themselves have already told us that the technology will have extremely negative effects on workers.

Krugman concludes:

There’s a strong element of poetic justice in this turn of events. The AI industry deliberately made itself look menacing as a financial strategy, believing that the markets would reward the appearance of being “edgy.” In so doing, however, tech made itself highly unpopular. And even in an era in which money all too often buys power, public opinion matters.