How’s the statement:
I am delighted to target the School of 2025 of Temple College of Liberal Arts. You have escaped the perils of living in challenging times. You coped with Covid in high school and your first years here, navigated your way through the sound of social media, and then face a disturbing social environment. The final section of that is meaningful to me. I was a student at Temple University during a period of upheaval in the country. Richard Nixon was our leader, the war was raging in Vietnam, and the future seemed questionable.
However, you have a problem that neither I nor my classmates could have imagined when we graduated over 50 years before: the fear that artificial intelligence will work in our jobs and create our career dreams worthless.
During my four times at Temple, I didn’t contact a computer keyboard. It wasn’t until about 10 years after my graduation that I eventually interacted directly with a system. I was given the task of writing a piece for Rolling Stone about system thieves. Their earth energized and fascinated me, so I decided to continue writing about it.
No long after my article was published I ventured to MIT and met Marvin Minsky, one of the experts who came up with the idea of artificial intelligence at a summer event at Dartmouth in 1956. Minsky and his coworkers predicted that laptops would only be a few years before they could consider like people. That naivety or optimism eventually developed into a punchline for several generations. High-level AI was generally 10 years apart, 20 years ahead. It was a story set in scientific literature.
That was still the situation until about 20 years ago or so. And then in this millennium, some computer professionals made advances in what were called neural traps. It spurred rapid development, and another significant breakthrough in 2017 gave rise to the frighteningly strong large-language models like ChatGPT. AI appears to be around.
My guess is that every individual one of you has used a huge vocabulary type like ChatGPT as a partner. Although I’m sorry, I’m sorry, but some of you may have used it as a stand-in for your own writing. If you’ve done this, don’t raise your hand because your professors are standing in my place waiting for certifications to be distributed.
Many of my day at WIRED the past few years has been spent talking to and writing about the people leading this area. Some claim that their efforts constitute” the final technology.” They use that phrase as, according to them, computers will push us humans aside and make progress on their own when AI reaches a particular level. They refer to this as reaching artificial general intelligence, or AGI. In theory, AI can perform any task a human does, but much at that time.
This moment of joy may well be combined with worry as you leave this organization for the real world. At the least, you may be worried that for the rest of your work life, you will not only been collaborating with Artificial but competing with it. Does that tarnish your leads?
Your compassion.
Graduates of liberal art, you have majored in fields like philosophy. Story. archaeology American American, Asian, and Gender Studies. Sociology. cultures. Philosophy. Political Science. Religion. Criminal Justice Economics. Additionally, there are even some American disciplines like I.
Each of those subjects requires an analysis and interpretation of human actions and imagination with emotion that only people can bring to the job. The observations you make in the social sciences, the analyses you produce on art and culture, the lessons you speak from your studies, have a magnificent integrity, based on the simple notion that you are devoting your focus, intelligence, and consciousness to fellow homo sapiens. People, that’s why we refer to them as the humanities.
The lords of AI are investing hundreds of billions of dollars to train their models to think like accomplished humans. You have just spent four years at Temple University learning to think AS accomplished humans. Unfathomable is the difference.
Steve Jobs first told me four decades ago that he wanted to marry computers and the liberal arts, and Silicon Valley is aware of this. I once wrote a history of Google. Cofounder Larry Page initially objected to hiring anyone without a computer science degree. However, the business realized that it was shoring up on the talent it needed for internal culture, business strategy, management, marketing, and communications. Some of those liberal arts grads it then hired became among the company’s most valuable employees.
even within AI-focused businesses. Liberal arts graduates have the potential to succeed. Did you know that the president of Anthropic, one of the top creators of generative AI, was an English major? She adored Joan Didion.
Additionally, your work creates a genuine human connection, something that AI can’t. OpenAI recently boasted that it trained one of its latest models to churn out creative writing. Maybe it can put together some interesting sentences, but that’s not what we really look for in criticism, films, and the visual arts. What would you think if you read a book that altered your perspective on the world, heard a podcast that transformed your spirit, watched a film that blew your mind, and heard a piece of music that moved your soul? You might feel cheated.
And that’s more than just a feeling. Some researchers published a paper in 2023 that confirmed this. In blind experiments human beings valued what they read more when they thought it was from fellow humans and not a sophisticated system that fakes humanity. Participants were shown abstract art created by both AI and humans in another blind experiment. When subjects were asked which pictures they liked better, the human-created ones came out on top, despite being unable to tell which was which. Other research studies involved brain MRIs. People said more favorably when they believed that humans, not AI, were the creators of the artworks, according to the scans. It appeared to be a primal connection.
Everything you have learned in the liberal arts—the humanities—depends on that connection. You possess superpowers in abundance.
I won’t embellish things. AI is going to have a huge impact on the labor market, and some jobs will be diminished or eliminated. History teaches us that with each significant technological advancement, new jobs are created to fill those that have been lost.
These positions will be available because there are many positions that AI can’t always fill because of the lack of authentic human connections. It’s the one thing that AI can’t offer. That connection will make your work of continuing value when combined with the elite skills you have learned at Temple. Particularly if you perform it with your own unique traits, such as curiosity, empathy, and sense of humor.
As you go into the workforce, I urge you to lean into your human side. Yes, you can use AI to simplify your work, explain complex concepts, and summarize time-consuming documents. It might even be a valuable adjunct. But you will thrive by putting your heart into your own work. AI lacks the same heart. In the end, algorithms, bits, and neural nets outweigh the importance of flesh, blood, and squishy neurons.
So class of 2025, let me send you out into the world with an expression that I encourage you to repeat during these challenging years to come. And that is the repeat of the unspoken truth that will guide your life and career as you leave this campus. I’ve got it here: Am. Human. Can you concur with me on that?
I Am Human.
Congratulations, and leave now to conquer the world. You can still conquer it. And one final note— I did not use AI to write this speech. Thank you.
( I’m wearing full academic regalia as I deliver the speech here. )
