ooooIYKYK, ISSUE #oo46, SUBSCRIBE TO THIS NEWSLETTER ON SUBSTACK.
No doubt you’ve heard the analogy of the proverbial bad dream where one finds oneself standing bare naked in front of the entire school. Maybe you’ve had the dream yourself. For some commencement speakers last week, this nightmare became reality… at least figuratively.
It’s graduation season, a time when commencement addresses by the famous and not-so-famous, all seeking to impart wisdom to the next generation, seep into the national dialogue for a hot couple of minutes. Think Baz Luhrmann’s Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen), but more dialed into today’s moment in time rather than the timelessness of his 1998 spoken lyric song that’s become nearly as melodically synonymous with graduation as Canon in D.
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Rather unsurprisingly, several of this year’s speakers chose to talk about A.I., its arrival and what that means for today’s graduates.
In most cases, from what I’ve seen and the way it’s been reported, the intent was to build an optimistic vision of a future augmented by A.I. What many of these were met with was a resounding chorus of boos. Some, like Gloria Caulfield, appeared surprised, while music industry executive Scott Borchetta responded more bluntly: “Deal with it… like I said, it’s a tool.”
In those moments, reading the room suddenly came to those speakers with a lot more clarity.
If you can get beyond the overarching effect A.I. will likely have on all facets of life, and if you’ve paid any attention to the automotive industry over the past decade, the parallels to the automotive landscape’s own relationship with electromobility seem hard to miss.
Those commencement speakers? They’re the car companies trained to watch the long term while simultaneously offering products aligned with the market’s current tastes. They’re the ones actively reading up on how emissions affect us globally, how battery technology is expected to evolve and how to engineer for legislation coming from the governing bodies of the world’s largest car markets.
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The trouble is, much like those graduates, the consumer market doesn’t really want to hear it. Most of us like the conditions we have. Most of us don’t want to consider those conditions aren’t infinite.
Sure, the current conflict with Iran and the resulting uptick in fuel pricing is reminding consumers of the practical advantages of electromobility in a very tangible way. In the end, though, we are human and tend to push back against change when we’re comfortable… or when we’re intimidated by something we’re not sure we fully understand. And, of course, there will always be those who prey on our desire for comfort or our lack of knowledge to their own advantage, amplifying frustrations further for personal gain.
Ironically, given that this is also about A.I. and the inevitable questions of attribution that come with it, it’s worth noting that Luhrmann didn’t actually write the words to the song so famously and timelessly associated with him. Credit for that goes to Mary Schmich and, perhaps even more famously, to the internet’s incorrect attribution of the piece to Kurt Vonnegut.
Unlike Luhrmann… or Vonnegut… via Schmich, I don’t have a timeless piece of sage advice to offer here. I’m simply pointing out the parallels and explaining them in hopes of giving people pause.
Pause before you tell graduates this overwhelming new factor can only be there to make their world change for the better when from their perspective all it looks like is another factor meant to keep them down.
Pause before you boo that commencement speaker who is just there to deliver the news in a way that inspires rather than scaring the (insert tone-permissible analogous reference) out of you.
Pause before you plug EVs on others… or figuratively unplug them out of frustration.
We need to thoughtfully consider what’s happening and how it will affect us long term, and neither happens by giving ourselves over completely to change nor by throwing up a blocking hand and striking a permanent Heisman Trophy pose.
Maybe that’s the modern equivalent of “trust me on the sunscreen.” Not blind optimism. Not reflexive resistance. Just enough humility to admit that the future usually arrives, perhaps at 4PM on some idle Tuesday, but most definitely before any of us have a chance to fully understand it.
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