Something telling happened at a university commencement in the summer of 2026.

It should have been a moment of hope. Graduates in caps and gowns, ready to step into the next chapter of their lives. The school had invited a bona fide "success story"—former Google CEO Eric Schmidt—to share his wisdom.

But the sound from the audience wasn't applause. It was booing.

01 | The Speech That Got Booed

Schmidt's opening was, on paper, unimpeachable. He spoke of a technological transformation bigger and faster than anything before, one that would touch every profession, every classroom, every person.

He tried to show he "got" the youth: I know you're afraid. Afraid the future has already been written. Afraid machines are closing in and jobs are vanishing. Afraid you're inheriting a mess you didn't make.

He even lowered the elite guard: It's not your fault. It's valid.

For a moment, the hall went quiet. Because a billionaire in his seventies had finally admitted their anxiety wasn't just whining.

But then he pivoted: Talking about the future as if it's predetermined is surrendering your agency. The future doesn't just arrive. It's built in labs, in dorms, in startups, by people like you.

The room turned restless.

He had to stop, visibly frustrated: At least let me finish this point. And then he delivered the Silicon Valley classic: "If you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, don't ask which seat. Just get on."

Decades ago, he had said the exact same thing to Sheryl Sandberg when she hesitated about joining Google. Back then, it was wisdom. Today, it was a spark in a tinderbox.

The speech ended early, drowned in a sea of jeers.

02 | The Elite Telescope vs. The Ordinary Microscope

Was Schmidt wrong?

From his vantage point, absolutely not. As a man in his seventies, he had lived through the full arc of the computing revolution and the internet revolution. He watched the cost of information retrieval collapse from "a week at the library" to "five seconds in a search box." He personally put Android into billions of pockets.

In his narrative, technology is a force for good. It connects the world, democratizes knowledge, liberates humanity from drudgery. He sees long-termism. He sees the productivity explosion ten years down the line.

But what about the people listening?

"I studied computer science for four years, and now my internship was automated away. Today someone tells me the future is bright and to just get on the rocket. I can't even reach the ladder."

"Congratulations on your college debt. Oh, and we're pushing a technology that will effectively replace you. Good luck paying that off."

This is the classic elite narrative: rational, grand, and dripping with optimism.

The problem is, elites and ordinary people live on different timelines. The wealthy have assets, networks, and passive income. Their time horizon stretches naturally to ten or twenty years. They can absorb short-term pain, so they can afford to look at the horizon.

Ordinary people are looking at this month's rent, next month's tuition, and whether their job will exist next year. Their time horizon has been forcibly compressed to next month, six months, maybe a year at most.

In the 19th century, British novelist and future Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli coined a phrase: "Two Nations."

During the Industrial Revolution, steam engines roared and factory owners accumulated wealth at unimaginable speeds. The elite saw the glory of the British Empire. The workers smelled the sewage, worked sixteen-hour shifts, and felt their craft and dignity being devoured by machines.

Today, facing AI, the world has once again split into Two Realities.

Those on stage speak of inevitable progress. Those in the audience wonder: How come I'm the one paying the price for it?

03 | Relative Deprivation: Pain Is Relative, Not Absolute

If it were merely "living in different worlds," the tension wouldn't be so sharp.

The real issue is this: More and more people feel the high-speed world is leaving them behind.

During World War II, American sociologist Samuel Stouffer discovered a counterintuitive phenomenon: soldiers in the Air Corps—where promotion opportunities were abundant—complained about "unfairness" far more than Military Police, where promotions were rare.

Why? Because MPs felt everyone was stuck, so there was nothing to complain about. But airmen saw their peers advancing while they stood still.

Often, pain isn't absolute. It's relative. This is "Relative Deprivation."

Whether someone feels "left behind by the times" doesn't depend on their income. It depends on what their reference group is experiencing.

So what truly stings isn't AI itself. It's the growing sense that the future everyone keeps celebrating has no seat reserved for me.

Look at history. The gains of technological revolutions are usually distributed slowly. But the costs arrive immediately.

1. Nottingham, England. Textile workers broke into factories at night and smashed the looms—the Luddite movement. Capitalists cheered productivity gains. Workers lost their craft and dignity.

The 2000s. The internet spread. E-commerce and search engines rose, preaching information equality. But many ordinary people felt their livelihoods being swallowed—bookstores closing, ad agencies losing clients, brick-and-mortar retail being crushed by e-commerce.

Today, OpenAI is valued at hundreds of billions. NVIDIA can't manufacture chips fast enough. Tech elites discuss "civilizational leaps." But young people see IBM layoffs. They see copywriting, translation, and junior legal analysis becoming obsolete.

What they resent isn't progress. It's the unfairness of prepaid costs—the cost is mine, but the dividend may never reach me.

04 | Why This Time Is Different: AI Is Removing the Rungs of the Ladder

In past revolutions, the young usually benefited most. New technology rewards those who are younger, more flexible, quicker to learn new rules.

Why are the youth booing this time?

Because the AI revolution differs from previous ones in three fundamental ways.

First, AI is hitting white-collar and knowledge work at scale.

For centuries, technology replaced manual labor. Steam engines replaced handcraft. Assembly lines replaced workshops. Robots replaced factory floors. Blue-collar workers bore the brunt.

So when programmers saw factory robots, they didn't feel threatened. When lawyers saw assembly lines, they didn't feel replaced.

But this wave of AI is hitting cognitive work first: writing code, making slides, taking meeting minutes, reviewing contracts. A higher degree no longer guarantees safety.

Second, the diffusion speed is outpacing society's ability to adapt.

The Industrial Revolution took decades. Society had time to build new roles and new rules. The costs were amortized over time.

The internet took over a decade. From dial-up to 4G, traditional media declined but new media rose. Retail stores closed, but delivery drivers appeared.

But AI's evolution is dizzying. According to SWE-bench Verified benchmarks, GPT-4 scored 1.7% at coding in late 2023. By mid-2024, 50%. Recently, GPT-5.5 hit 82.6%. Human programmers average around 70%.

Two years. From far below human level to above it.

In the past, an average graduate could start in customer service, operations, or assistant roles and grow. Researching, spreadsheet-ing, debugging—these repetitive but essential tasks were the rungs of the career ladder. Those rungs are being removed, one by one.

Third, and most devastating: the collapse of stable expectations.

People used to believe effort brought reward. Learn a trade, enter an industry, grind for ten years—the return was certain. Maybe not riches, but at least employment.

Now? I just learned Python—will AI write it itself next year? I'm in design—will large models generate decks the year after? This "planning paralysis" is worse than unemployment. Unemployment is an event. The collapse of expectations is a chronic, unending anxiety.

05 | How We Are Rewriting AI's Delivery to Ordinary People

It's easy to mock elites for being "out of touch." But that changes nothing.

The harder question is: When the AI rocket is indeed launching, what can ordinary people do besides standing on the ground and looking up?

At Recolx, we hold a simple belief: The dividends of technological revolution never flow to ordinary people automatically—unless someone deliberately designs the on-ramp for them.

This isn't a slogan. We spent an enormous amount of time thinking about one thing: AI capabilities are already immense, but what does an average sales rep, a junior legal assistant, or a project manager running three meetings a day actually need?

They don't need another chat window requiring prompt-engineering skills. They need an AI companion that slips seamlessly into their workflow, with zero learning curve—delivered through devices people already understand, like an ai voice recorder.

That's why we build an AI voice recorder and AI earbuds, including translator earbuds for live multilingual meetings.

Not so users can "experience AI," but so AI's power can be delivered through the most natural human actions: listening and speaking. On mobile, people often ask how to record call on iPhone; with consent and where legally allowed, our companion app works with the voice recorder to capture and transcribe calls made on speakerphone or through supported integrations.

Picture a typical day for an average sales professional. Three client meetings, five phone calls, two internal reviews. Their core value should be capturing needs, building trust, and closing deals. But in reality, 80% of their energy is consumed by "getting it down" and "getting it organized."

In a one-hour client meeting, how many details stick in memory? Three days later, can they still recall the client casually mentioning, "Our budget actually opens up in Q3"? While scrambling to take notes, they miss the hesitation in the client's expression, the probing in their tone.

Recolx doesn't sell a replacement for salespeople. We sell a cognitive extension—an external brain.

The conversation is transcribed automatically. AI extracts key decision points and next-step action items in real time. No more splitting focus between listening and note-taking; they can be fully present in the dialogue. During review, they can instantly locate moments of peak client interest and objection-handling timing—turning every loss into a learning iteration. Every conversation is archived into a searchable knowledge base, so context never walks out the door when a team member leaves.

An ordinary professional doesn't need to understand large model architecture or memorize prompt syntax. They just need to keep doing what they've always done—speak, listen—and let AI capture, organize, and distill everything in the background.

This is how Recolx defines AI democratization: not turning everyone into an AI expert, but delivering the expert's capabilities to every ordinary person through a piece of hardware that feels as natural as breathing.

While others spend three hours cleaning up meeting notes, you have your action list. While others dig through three-month-old emails to find what a client said, you search a keyword and surface the decision rationale in seconds. While AI removes the rungs of repetitive cognitive labor, Recolx is building new rungs—the rungs of human-AI collaboration.

06 | Closing Thoughts

We know AI is powerful. But technology is technology; society is society.

To the new graduate: The narrative of "study hard, join a big tech firm, earn a high salary" that worked for the last two decades is crumbling fast. It's not your fault. But you must accept a new reality—your competition isn't just your peers anymore. It's tireless algorithms. What you need isn't a job "AI can't touch." It's tools that let you collaborate with AI.

To the professional in the crosshairs: Especially if your work is in the high-risk cognitive zone—copywriting, design, translation, junior analysis. Document everything, protect your rights, but plan your pivot. A few more years of waiting won't outrun industry-wide transformation.

To those already benefiting from AI: Founders, engineers, one-person business owners. Your wealth accumulation may dwarf previous tech waves. Any lecturing from a position of privilege is salt in society's wounds. What actually matters is building what Recolx is building—translating AI's power into tools ordinary people use every single day.

The world today is more advanced than at any point in history. Yet it has never been harder to empathize across the divide.

But we remain convinced that the ultimate meaning of technological revolution isn't creating new class chasms. It's ensuring that when the rocket launches, ordinary people aren't just watching from the ground—they have a seat, and it has their name on it.

Recolx is in the business of saving those seats.

About Recolx: We are committed to rewriting how ordinary people work through AI hardware. Our AI voice recorder and AI earbuds are the first step in delivering on our promise of AI democratization, and our translator earbuds extend these benefits to conversations across languages.

Q&A

Question: Why did the commencement audience boo Eric Schmidt’s speech, and was he wrong?

Short answer: The backlash reflected a clash of timelines and lived realities, not a simple right-or-wrong. Schmidt’s long-term, optimistic view of technology fits an elite horizon that can absorb short-term pain for future gains. Graduates facing debt, disappearing entry-level rungs, and near-term job insecurity hear “just get on the rocket” as dismissive of immediate costs they must prepay. The speech symbolized “Two Realities”: those celebrating inevitable progress and those asking why they’re the ones paying for it now.

Question: What is “Relative Deprivation,” and how does it shape reactions to AI?

Short answer: Relative Deprivation is the feeling of being left behind not because of absolute conditions, but compared to one’s peers or reference group. The essay cites wartime research showing more complaints where promotions were abundant because people saw others advancing while they didn’t. Applied to AI, what hurts isn’t only the tech shift itself—it’s watching others win (skyrocketing valuations, chip shortages, elite enthusiasm) while your own path feels blocked. People resent bearing immediate costs with no clear share of future dividends.

Question: Why is this AI wave different—and why are young people anxious?

Short answer: Three reasons set this wave apart:

• It targets white-collar, cognitive tasks at scale (coding, drafting, reviewing), eroding the safety long associated with advanced degrees.
• Its diffusion is exceptionally fast. Benchmarks cited show model performance in coding jumping from 1.7% (late 2023) to 50% (mid-2024) to 82.6% (recent), surpassing average human levels in about two years—outpacing societal adaptation.
• It collapses stable expectations. The old promise—learn a skill, grind, get steady returns—feels unreliable when junior, repetitive tasks (the “rungs” of the ladder) are automated, creating chronic planning anxiety.

Question: How does Recolx propose to give ordinary workers a “seat on the rocket”?

Short answer: Recolx focuses on delivery, not demos: an AI companion that fits existing behavior—listening and speaking—via an AI voice recorder and AI earbuds (including translator earbuds for live multilingual meetings). In real time, it transcribes conversations, surfaces key decisions and next steps, and archives everything into a searchable knowledge base. That means no prompt engineering or workflow overhaul—just talk, listen, and let AI capture, organize, and distill in the background. On mobile, and only with consent and where legally allowed, the companion app can work with the recorder to capture and transcribe calls made on speakerphone or through supported integrations.

Question: Does Recolx aim to replace workers—or help them keep their seat?

Short answer: Recolx frames its tools as a “cognitive extension,” not a substitute. By automating capture and organization, it frees people to do what humans do best—build trust, read context, make judgments—while turning every conversation into reusable team knowledge. Instead of removing rungs, it adds new ones for human–AI collaboration: while others spend hours cleaning notes, you leave meetings with clear action items and instantly retrievable context, preserving dignity and accelerating learning.