Corporate AI Psychosis
The graduates are booing, and the boardrooms can't hear them
This post follows my standard early access schedule: paid subscribers today, free for everyone on June 2.
I spent last weekend in the Bay Area, where my older son received his PhD in physics from UC Berkeley, a milestone the whole family is extremely proud of. The keynote at the main commencement, held in the UC Berkeley campus stadium, was given by Robert Reich, political commentator and former Secretary of Labor. It was a fine speech, surprisingly free of explicit political commentary, though Reich’s progressive sympathies were never in doubt.
Artificial intelligence came up exactly once in the entire address. But that was all it took. The word had barely left his mouth before the crowd began to boo. I recorded the following video which captures this moment.
Reich, a seasoned public figure, turned the situation to his advantage. “I appreciate your response,” he said. His delivery suggested he had anticipated the reaction, perhaps even hoped for it. Yet nothing in the rest of the speech built on the sentiment the crowd had just shown. The booing came and went, and he moved on.
The booing itself didn’t surprise me. Many graduation crowds across the country booed AI this spring, often much louder than Berkeley did. The place is what makes this one very different.
UC Berkeley sits beside Stanford as one of the two leading universities that feed the talent pipeline of Silicon Valley. When the graduating class of such a place reacts adversely to the mere mention of a technology, it reads as something more durable than a passing mood. It reads as a signal that something has gone seriously wrong.
And it has gone wrong in a peculiar way. As those crowds booed, the companies a few miles down the road seem to have no idea how their core audiences feel. They pledge devotion to the unbroken advancement of AI, and meanwhile the graduates of the most selective universities in the country cannot find the entry-level jobs that this very technology has quietly absorbed.
Some commentators have given this condition a name. They call it “Corporate AI Psychosis.” The phrase borrows from “AI psychosis,” the term for the delusional thinking that chatbots can induce in vulnerable people, and lifts it from individual to organizational scale. The idea is that artificial intelligence has seeded a kind of corporate delusion in the executive suites of some of the most powerful firms on earth.
In this essay, I want to explore this phenomenon a bit deeper and offer my thoughts, also on what it means for education.
