Here’s the longer version of Eric Schmidt’s commencement speech from Arizona State & an AI transcript.
Every mention of AI, instantly booed.
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Every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person, and every relationship you have. I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear.
There is a fear in your generation. And that the future has already been written, that the machines are coming, that the jobs are evaporating, that the climate is breaking, that politics is fractured, and that you are inheriting a mess that you did not create.
And I understand that fear. It's rational. And it's amplified every day by social media platforms, with algorithms that have learned with great precision, that fear earns clicks, and that anxiety drives engagement.
But I want to say something to you this evening as clearly as I can. To speak of the future, as though it has already been decided, is to surrender the one thing that actually matters. You are surrendering your agency. The future does not simply arrive. It gets built in laboratories, in dormitories, in startups, in classrooms, in legislators, and the people building it will be you and people like you.
The question is not whether AI will shape the world — it will. The question is whether you will help shape artificial intelligence.
We do not know the precise contours of what this transformation will look like. But what we do know is it will require each of us to adapt in ways that we cannot yet anticipate.
My hope is that you will choose to engage, that you choose to be in the room where these decisions take place, and to have a voice in how they're made. When you are in that room, bring something with you — bring the values that make us human in the first place. The technology on its own is just a tool. It will optimize for what we tell it to optimize for. But somebody has to decide, and in your lifetime, that somebody is going to be you.
So choose freedom. Choose open debates, and the slow, often messy, but beautiful project of learning to live alongside people with whom you disagree. Choose equality. Choose a diversity of perspectives, including the perspective of the immigrant, who has so often been the person who came to this country and made it better.
America is at its best when we are the country that ambitious people want to come to. Let us not lose that. But above all, choose respect for one another, and for the basic unfashionable idea that the person on the other side of the argument is still a person.
If we build artificial intelligence to reflect those values, the world will be unimaginably better for it.
So let me tell you how hopeful I am about that, because on balance, I am deeply optimistic, and I believe that you should be as well.
So consider science. So much of human progress is the story of science and medicine, and artificial intelligence is already accelerating research at a rate that we could not have imagined even five years ago. We have only seen maybe one percent of what is to come. AI is now designing new molecules, running simulations, identifying patterns in genomic data that no team of humans could uncover in a lifetime.
AI has solved the 50-year-old protein folding problem in a matter of months. The next generation of antibiotics will come from this work. The next generation of cancer treatments will come from this work. The materials that will allow us to scale clean energy will come from this work.
Or look at astronomy, a field in which this university excels. The team at the Steward Observatory are building a telescope more powerful than Hubble. That work, which is changing the understanding of the universe, is happening right here in Tucson right now.
