I had the distinct honor of being invited to deliver the commencement address for the graduation of the Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University in Dubai two weeks ago, on March 15, 2024. The video of my remarks can be found here. Here is the full text.
Speech for Hamdan Bin Mohammed Smart University Graduation
15 May 2024
Your Highness Sheikh Mansoor bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, Excellencies, faculty, graduates, proud families, and distinguished guests. It’s my tremendous honor to be here with you today.
We come together to celebrate this important milestone on your journey toward ever greater impact, meaning, and fulfillment. The diplomas you graduates receive today recognize both the successful completion of this phase of your education and the obligations you are assuming as you begin the next phase of your lives.
Like many other people these days, I keep returning to Dubai and the UAE with increasing frequency. Every time I’m here I am astounded by the scope and scale of the new buildings sprouting up, the new communities emerging, the cutting edge technologies racing forward, and the increasing sophistication of the governance, workforce, and environment.
In a geographic region where so many dreams too often go unrealized or are even crushed, this community represents what is possible when people of good faith come together with open hearts and minds in an environment dedicated to life.
This city and country, in other words, are growing oases of potential, peace, and prosperity.
No one could have predicted fifty short years ago that an American like me would come here to, in many ways, see the future. At that time, very few of the buildings around us existed. This was not a major hub of world trade, technological innovation, or talent development. But that does not mean there wasn’t a great deal already here. In fact, the seeds of what we see today were planted many decades ago.
The core foundation of this remarkable city and country is not the buildings and technology but the values the late His Highness Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the “Father of the Nation,” the late Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum, and the other leaders and builders of past generations instilled when almost none of what we see today was even imaginable to most people. These wise predecessors, living in very different environments than we do and with far fewer educational opportunities, articulated principles that have proven even more essential to this success than any city planning grid, architectural designs, or network of fiber-optic cables.
These core values are listed on walls, monuments, and other places across the emirates. They are also woven into every community and every technology here, just like the letters and numbers of our ancient writing codes today animate our computer codes.
This invisible but essential foundation of values helps explain why the UAE has among the highest levels of tolerance in this region, including for people of all faiths, and why some of the most talented people in the world want to come here to realize their aspirations. It explains why the UAE is growing and diversifying as it thoughtfully engages with new technologies and new ideas. It explains why this country is working courageously to promote regional harmony, peace, and security through the Abraham Accords and other measures. All of these go hand-in-hand.
People, values, dreams, and progress all go hand-in-hand.
Not every pillar is visible to the naked eye. Some of the most important foundations must be seen with our minds and with our hearts.
That’s why it’s so significant you are graduating from an essentially virtual university, a university of and for the twenty-first century.
Unlike the many physical universities now providing digital offerings, yours is a digital native university leveraging new technologies and approaches to realize its bold, optimistic, and inclusive vision of the future. By placing the needs of learners ahead of institutional needs, HBMSU is democratizing access to quality education and blending the best of our educational and cultural traditions with new possibilities our advancing capabilities afford.
This will make it possible for students in the most remote and underprivileged communities across the globe to receive world-class educations, empowering them to both help themselves and contribute their incredible capacities to the pool of global innovation helping everyone.
This type of educational innovation is more important than ever as our technological superpowers advance exponentially. It’s not just that the power of silicon chips has roughly doubled every two years for decades, what’s often called Moore’s Law. It’s that a growing number of revolutionary technologies are advancing at similar or even faster rates.
Since the 1980s, for example, the cost of genome sequencing has dropped around one billion percent while sequencing has become exponentially more accurate and useful. Advances in other technologies from artificial intelligence to quantum computing, robotics, genome editing, and so much more will continue to accelerate for the foreseeable future.
All of this is leading us toward a next phase in human development in which we will increasingly engineer intelligence and re-engineer life.
Think about that for a moment.
After 3.8 billion years of life on earth, our one species among the billions that have ever lived is now building machines that can increasingly peer into the smallest molecules and the vastness of the universe, identify previously unknowable patterns in massive pools of data, solve problems we can’t even see, think, create art, and help us hack the source code of life.
The prospect of these changes should excite us all.
Most every person in this graduating class will live in a world where AI systems will guide us safely through our lives in deeply meaningful ways. Many of the natural resources we need will be grown rather than cut down or dug up. Crops will thrive in deserts and other areas deeply impacted by climate change. Animal products will be generated from a few cells nurtured in industrial bioreactors. Currently death sentence diseases will be curable and preventable. Virtual and physical worlds will become seamlessly integrated. Automated laboratories and digital twins will help shift scientific and technological innovation into superdrive.
But if all we see are the potential upsides, we’ll put ourselves in grave danger.
The same underlying technologies generating possibilities we may desire also potentially open the door to terrible accidents and abuses. The technologies that end pandemics can also start them. The AI systems that can empower us could also dehumanize and disempower us. The autonomous weapons that might defend us from attack could also inflict almost unimaginable harms.
And because our new technologies are advancing faster than any innovations in history, there is a very real potential they could outpace our ability to build the safeguards we need within the necessary time frame.
But there’s a reason evolution has preserved the very human emotion of anxiety. Worrying that bad things might happen is nature’s way of helping us steer a better course.
Although we have different possible futures before us, the difference between the futures we want and those we don’t, dear graduates, is you. It’s all of us drawing on all the wisdom we can muster to ensure our most cherished values guide the application of our most powerful technologies. It’s the governance, transparency, and accountability systems we develop to optimize benefits for all while minimizing potential harms. It’s recognizing that although none of us and none of our systems are perfect, our lives and work must be dedicated to continuous improvement.
To put it another way, building the futures we want requires each and all of us to nurture and grow our oases.
In this, democratizing access to quality education, the core mission of this university, is absolutely essential. Even the most enlightened leaders will not be able to do what needs to be done on their own. It will take all of us, including all of you.
Your best values will need to guide you in a future we’ll be sharing with each other and with very powerful technologies possessing increasing levels of agency. We’ll need to continually assess how we humans can work best together, what we can do better than machines, what machines can do better than us, and what we and machines can best do together. As we build peak machines, we’ll need to keep asking ourselves what it means to be peak humans.
In an ideal world, our technologies can free us to focus on becoming better humans just like plows and tractors helped more of us become painters, poets, and philosophers. If we do not turn that ideal into a reality, the opposite could also become true.
Navigating these difficult waters will require a deep commitment to lifelong learning. All of the content you have acquired these past years is not as important as what you have learned about the process of learning.
Learning requires keeping our minds open and fluid, exploring perspectives other than our own, continually collecting data, and evolving beliefs as we gain new insights. You will need to nurture your essentially human curiosity and creativity and train yourselves to think a little more like science fiction writers because the future rushing at us will increasingly feel like science fiction.
As we reach toward these skies, we must also remain grounded. Sheikh Zayed understood the value of planting trees as an investment in the future, and is said to have planted 100 million trees and 45 million palm trees over the course of his life. We now stand in their shade, both literally and figuratively.
“Someone’s sitting in the shade today,” Warren Buffet has said, “because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” You and we are beneficiaries of trees planted by our predecessors and are the planters of trees that will give shade and comfort to future generations.
And so, dear graduates, as we honor the end of this chapter in your lives and the exciting beginning of the next, I ask you:
What seeds are you planting?
What oases do you seek to nurture?
Whom do you aspire to become who can grow those oases and that future, for yourself, your family, your community, and our world?
What steps will you take toward building a future you’d like to inhabit and a legacy to pass to your children, your grandchildren, and all of humanity?
I know your answers will be remarkable.
Thank you and congratulations.