“There is no reality until you measure it.” - Niels Bohr
“What gets measured gets managed.” - Peter Drucker
“A false balance is abomination to the LORD: but a just weight is His delight” - Proverbs 11:1
Eric Schmidt gave a Commencement Address to the University of Arizona Class of 2026 that received several negative responses from the graduates due to how he emphasized A.I. changing society. He referred to the moment as being a rocket ship: “When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on. Graduates, the rocket ship is here.” A Commencement Address provides a lot to chew on, especially on the topic of Artificial Intelligence, but I’m not going to focus on that aspect directly. Rather, I will side step to commentary that optimization programmer Casey Muratori called out a couple weeks ago: Eric Schmidt blatant absconding of responsibility for what he managed.
Before I go further, here's a link to a transcription I made of Schmidt's speech for reference. The only copy I could find was YouTube's AI auto-transcription. Which, given the discourse, feels like a poor choice to link to (especially with its inaccuracies).
The passage from the Address that Mr. Muratori highlights in his own video is the change of tense from active to passive in this passage:
We believed that connecting every human being on earth to each other and I really believe this and all of the world's information would be an unambiguous good. We believe that it would democratize knowledge, lift people out of poverty, and make us wiser and kinder and more curious about each other. In a sense, we thought that we were adding stones to a cathedral of knowledge that humanity had be constructing for centuries. But the world we built turned out to be more complicated than we anticipated.
The same tools that connect us also isolate us. The same platforms that gave everyone a voice like, you're using now, also degraded the public square. They rewarded outrage. They amplified the worst instincts. They coarsened the way we speak to each other in that way and in the way that we treat each other in the essence of a society. In the years that after I graduated, no one sat down and resolved to build a technology that would polarize democracies and unsettle a generation of young people. That was not our plan. But it happened.
Eric Schmidt was CEO of Google from 2001 to 2011, where he helped define AdWords, AdSense, and Google Analytics, as well as built the core platforms of Gmail, YouTube, Chrome, and Maps. These products create an ecosystem for internet users to persist inside of, for Google to cultivate profiles of insight for their advertising tools. I recognize he didn't code these projects himself but he was the architect for the vision that establishes the foundation of what Google and Alphabet are today.
These awful observations from his 2026 speech (e.g. degrading the public square, rewarding outrage, amplifying the worst instincts) are exactly the output that Eric Schmidt designed his company for. These design choices are purposeful because of the well-established fact that outrage sells clicks. Meta is very guilty of this behavior too: just read “Careless People” by Sarah Wynn-Williams to appreciate the gross misconduct that these tech titans label as "for the betterment” of humanity. At the end of the day, it's a private business mislaying public trust.
What is most upsetting to me is how disingenuous these actors are while they manipulate their cyber-turf— it's just business for them yet they guide life changing technology and policies based on their adulterated perspectives. If a tree in the real world has a spectrum of colors, I can debate with a friend which tones are which and we can eventually point to clusters of leaves and come to an agreement that one leaf is lighter than the other. That is never the case with the feeds provided by Meta and Google: ever-present in their design is the intention to create a “unique perspective” for you based on your usage of their products. There was a time when these products were deterministic based on the inputs, but now these corporations rather profit off the ability to inject their advertiser's message than offer truth to build “a cathedral of knowledge” as Eric Schmidt enunciated.
To Eric Schmidt, again: I'm go as far as to say he is blatantly lying to the graduates that his platform's problems “just happened.” His judgement was clouded by the demands to make more money always: if he wanted to make a better product he could outright tell his chief engineers “Hey guys, I'm noticing a lot of outrage on the platform, let's investigate and see if we can stop fanning the flames.” We can now see from his putz-y speech that he actively ignored this call for his 10 year tenure as CEO of Google, and continues to pass on the opportunity to this day.
Which is why his calls to the graduates of Arizona University are hollow: Eric Schmidt is talking his book of unity, love, and world-changing-technology, beckoning us to “participate in designing” the future with a tool his company has created. A tool, mind you, the Frontier A.I. Labs dress in marketing descriptions like “magic” with promises of AGI and the “foothills of the singularity.” This software tool is potentially so much more powerful than anything Eric Schmidt has had his hands on, and his track record leads us to not put our trust in him.
How should we to feel about a dishonest man telling us to join in on his plans involving a “world dominating” technology? I'd feel an oily dirt that can't be cleaned; a disorienting nonconsensual proposition has been laid on the table and an answer must be given. But we realize that if this man is left to his own devices, future evil could sprout.
Or in Eric Schmidt's own words: "happened."