You Don't Have to Use AI
My Commencement Address to our 2025 Graduating Class
This is what I said to this year's graduating class of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineers at Cornell.
As you are certainly aware, you are graduating at a technological inflection point, brought about by high-performance probabilistic content generators, sometimes called “AI”.
You are one of the first college classes graduating with this technology at your fingertips, and one of the first wave of people entering a workforce that is increasingly embracing this technology across the board. We have never had a technology that is so adept at writing high-quality text, summarizing large amounts of written data, and performing at many content-related tasks as well as, or better than, humans.
Where does this leave you, the young engineer just entering the workforce?
As someone who has studied AI and the interaction between technology and society for decades, I feel confident in saying that nobody has any idea where this generative content technology will take us.
At times like this, I like to invoke the philosopher and media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who said, and I paraphrase, that, at the onset, the content of every new medium is simply an older medium. He suggested that, at first, film was just used to capture and replay theater performances, television just broadcast films. Similarly, Youtube initially just posted content from television, and podcasts just made radio available on-demand.
It is only after people experiment with a new medium that they discover new ways to use it that don’t just encapsulate an old medium. This then changes the landscape forever, and we get MTV music videos, TikTok reaction videos, and CGI-generated Marvel movies that have almost nothing in common with stage theater.
Similarly, we are now in a transition period where we use “AI” to generate content from the previous era. We use it to write essays, summarize papers, and do homework, all while waiting to understand and discover the real use of this technology, which might make problem sets, CVs, and even PowerPoint presentations a complete thing of the past.
As some of the brightest people facing this change, it is important to remember, though, that no technology is inevitable. ChatGPT is not a natural phenomenon or a divine gift that we just have to accept as is. On the contrary: It is up to you to shape how it operates, in what contexts it should be allowed, how and when you use it, and even whether you want to use it at all.
I like to tell young people to remember one rule: things are never the way they are for a good reason. Always be skeptical and challenge the status quo, because you are the ones who are going to determine the shape of things to come.
In particular, if I were you, I would be highly suspicious of a tool whose explicit goal is to replace your skills and ability to think, the very thing that you worked so hard for the last 20-odd years to hone and improve. Yes, you might be better off on the immediate horizon, as you are designing this next slideshow and crafting this next CV, but after you’re done submitting everything, I encourage you to debate and discuss with your friends what the end-game of this technology is, and what you want it to be.
It is also worth remembering that any technology is ideological, and the ideology of the tech industry is individualism. This is what Silicon Valley believes in: the individual person. For example, we always hear the story of boy geniuses (yes, they are almost always boys), who took big chances on their own, and went on to invent crazy things out of the brilliance of their minds, to make society better.
Here, I’d like to quote from a book written by a friend of mine, Noam Cohen, entitled “The Know-it-Alls”:
[Silicon Valley] taps into our yearning for a better life that technology can bring, a utopia made real, yet one cannot escape the suspicion that these entrepreneurs may not fully appreciate what it means to be human. That is, not just to be a human individual […] but to be part of a family, a community, a society.
The feminist political theorist Susan Moller Okin argued convincingly that [in the individualistic] fantasy, men magically arrive at adulthood ready to remake the world: How? Raised by whom? If advocates for extreme individualism actually had to acknowledge the work and sacrifice of women to bear and nurture children, Okin contended, as well as the assistance of society in children's upbringing, their arguments would lose all force. No one would then be able to say with a straight face that whatever he has is the product of his own hard work and should be his alone to control. 'Behind the individualist façade […],’ she concluded, 'the family is assumed but ignored.'
And this is a great moment, on this day of your really amazing individual achievement, to not ignore the family and society, who were there with you all the way from Day One. The parents, grandparents, and caregivers who woke up in the middle of the night to hug you back to sleep when you were little, the uncountable people who worked hard, really hard, to make sure you had healthy food on your plate and a clean place to sleep – not just at home, but also here at Cornell. Some of these invaluable individuals sit right here with you…
(Let’s stand up, turn, and thank those here right now)
…others are sitting, tear-filled, on WhatsApp and Zoom across the world, watching you, and yet others are standing outside waiting to clean up after this event.
They are all proud of you. We are all proud of you. Now go out there and change the world. Spend lots of time with your friends and family. Watch movies in theaters. Leave your phone at home when you go out. Be the best version of yourself you can be. Forgive yourself and others. We hope you learned some of the things you need to know, right here.
Congratulations to the MAE class of 2025!