AI WON'T TAKE NO FOR AN ANSWER

Google presses ahead with a fresh batch of artificial intelligence tech... whether the public want it or not

- JUSTIN CONNOLLY

Wesley Parker has lent his design skills to Google's latest accessibility tool

Will we live in strange times in the tech world... all thanks to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence.

On the one hand, every company on the planet is trying to shoehorn something — they're calling AI into every product or service they can.

On the other, measured by most metrics, the general public is at best suspicious of AI, and at worst demonstrably hostile to it.

There was no better example of this weird dichotomy than when ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt stood up to give a commencement speech to the freshly minted graduates of the University of Arizona earlier this month.

He largely focused on AI and how it might impact the graduates' lives going forward... and was loudly booed every time he uttered those two little letters.

His bemusement and dismissal of the crowd's protests seem very representative of the general view in Silicon Valley — we're having AI whether we like it or not.