Thank you very much President Cohen. I want to start by congratulating all the graduates and I want to especially congratulate the parents. And for the parents remember that the students will still need you and maybe they’ll now they’ll listen to you now that they graduated.
When I see computers and mobile phones, and I want you to look and think about…everybody here has a mobile phone with you and a camera, I want you to remember that everything you touched was probably invented by computer scientists that came from Carnegie Mellon.
And this startling and surprising statistic is actually true that in the 60s, much of what we know in modern computing, was invented here by giants in my field and I, as a young person roughly your age, worked with people who seemed much older than me in their thirties who had come through that program, who ultimately came to develop the networks, the work stations, the personal computers and the mobile computing we use today. I was so impressed by what Carnegie Mellon had done for computer science that not only did I become a trustee for a while but Google now has one of its very top ranked development centers here right on campus where we have, in many cases, the very best graduates and employees that we could possibly get.
These are people who do amazing things as part of our underlying system and they occasionally do interesting things as well that you wouldn’t expect. We just released a product called Star Draw you take your mobile phone, turn it to the sky and it tells you what the stars are doing. How neat is that?
Why is Carnegie Mellon the place that is so exceptional? I think it’s because the culture is a culture of getting things done. It’s not a purely theoretical culture, it’s not a purely tactical culture, it’s a culture that’s about accomplishing things for the world and that is true regardless of the division, the department, the college, the institute that you are part of and graduated from.
So when I think about you all, I think about you as the Facebook and the Google generation. The first generation that really grew up with the internet. When I grew up we had tang, you had Red Bull, we used a programming language called basic you all used Java, we had VCRs that held a half an hour of video that cost 700 dollars and you all can upload 15 hours of video into YouTube every minute.
We got our news from newspapers, your generation gets it from blogs and tweets, and for those of you who don’t know, that’s not what you hear in zoos. We stood in line to buy pong, you stood in line to buy weez.
We just didn’t tell anyone about our most embarrassing moments, you record them and post them to Facebook and YouTube every day. I am so happy that my record of my miss achievements is not around for posterity. I’m looking forward to yours being there for many, many years. Did you know that we used mainframe computers with 300 MB of storage to go to the moon 6 times? Your iPods, 120 GB, 500 times more just to get you to your next class.
We thought ‘friend’ is a noun, you think it’s a verb. We had phone booths, anybody seen a phone booth recently? You have cell phones, we wore watches, took pictures with cameras, navigating with maps and listened to transition radios, you have a cell phone. We thought that the marvels of computers and technology, again largely invented here, will change the world. You agree and we’re both right.
Why did you all go to college? To develop the kind of analytical thinking skills confronting the spin, the crazy choices of information that you’ll have going forward. And I would argue that you have the opportunity to be the greatest generation because right in front of you now are tools that we never had, that you can take advantage of. And you sit there saying that this guy must be mad, and maybe that’s a little true. But in front of us you say oh the world is falling apart, we have this recession and so forth. I mean I did some research using my favorite search engine of course, the great depression spurred some incredible innovation, Rice Krispies, Twinkies and the beer can. You would have never gotten through college without these three things. So good things happen in recessions.
Why is ubiquitous information so important? Why is it so important that we have access to all these things? It's a tremendous equalizer. In our lifetime, literally certainly in yours, if not mine, essentially every human being on the planet will have access to every piece of information known on the planet. This is a remarkable achievement. God knows what these people will do and it’s going to be pretty amazing. And information serves as a check and balance on politicians. You know if you were a dictator which you’re not going to be since you’re fine graduates of Carnegie Mellon the first thing you would do is shut off communications to make sure people couldn’t take advantage of knowledge and overthrow you. So what you do now with oppressive regimes and people who do evil things is you attack them with information. You get that information out there; you use the tools and technology that all of us have worked so hard on to make the world a better place.
So what can we do with a vastly more powerful web? The web of information that comprises of all of what we know, you can obviously have face to face meetings with colleagues around the world, but more importantly, now we can do dynamic translations so we can translate between languages so you can actually understand. You’re traveling in Mongolia and you’re on a motorcycle, many of you will do this right after you graduate to get away and you have an accident, you can actually have a doctor consult with you half way around the world and they can translate and provide you the health care that you need. These are very real wins. But most importantly, you can ask Google the most important questions that bother you. Like where are my car keys after all. Computers are really good at remembering some things and in the new world much of this again, technology that was invented here we know where everything can be, we can find them, we can keep track of things; we can make your lives more functional.
But you can also ask questions like what’s the solution going to be for global warming, where’s the vaccine for flu pandemics and you thought finals were hard. So what you should do now? It seems to me that you should think about George Bernard Shaw who said that all progress depends on a reasonable man, don’t bother to have a plan at all. All that stuff about a plan throws that out. It seems to me that it’s all about opportunity and makes your own luck. You study the most successful people and they work hard and they take advantage of opportunities that come that they don’t know are going to happen to them. You cannot plan innovation. You cannot plan invention. All you can do is try very hard to be at the right place and be ready.
There’s lots of…the pacemaker for example was invented 70 years in one form or the other before it was applied to this one poor fellow 25 pace makers later, he was still alive. But the important point is that he wouldn’t have been at all had the pacemaker not been invented. You never know and life is like that. Life…this is a John Lenin quote, life is what happens to you when you’re busy making other plans. So live it with its fullness and if you live your life and forgo your plan you can also forgo fear. In some sense you’ve been penalized for making mistakes historically, now you have to go out there and make them because mistakes allow you to learn and to innovate and try new things and that’s a culture of innovation that is going to create the next…of opportunities for all of you as you come to run and rule the world and the rest of us retire.
What should you do? How should you behave? Well, do things in a group. Don’t do things by yourself. Groups are stronger, groups are faster. None of us is as smart as all of us. You can use Twitter as a form of social intelligence in its successors as well. Watson and Crick who discovered the structure of DNA met at a university, today they would meet on Facebook. And they would find each other and do these amazing things. And they’d say to each other what are you doing right now? Oh finding the secret of life, oh then off to a pub lol. It’s okay. I would tell you that amidst all this change, some truths endure. Leadership and personality matter, we saw that from our student speaker. Intelligence, education and analytical reasoning matter. Trust matters in a network world. Trust is your most important currency which brings me to my final question what is the meaning of life? Correct question to ask in a university. In a world where everything is remembered and kept forever, the world you are graduating into. You should live for the future and the things that you really care about. Don’t live in the past, live in the future. And what are those things?
To figure this out you actually need to turn off your computer, I know this is difficult. You need to turn off your phone, you actually need to look at the people who are near you and around you and decide that it is humans who ultimately are the most important thing to us, not the other aspects. You’ll find out, I hope, what I believe very strongly that people all around us of every race, color and view point are fundamentally want the same things, they want a great and safe world and they want prosperity and peace among all of us. You’ll find that curiosity, enthusiasm and passion are very contagious and I want you to show that because you have it by virtue of being here.
You’ll find that nothing beats the holding the hand of your grandchild as he takes his first step. You’ll find that a mind set in its own ways, set in its ways, locked down is a mind and a life wasted. Don’t do it. You’ll find that the resilience in the human spirit is amazing, it’s what got us through World War I, World War II and it will get us through our current challenges just fine. You’ll find today is the best chance you have to start being unreasonable, to demand excellence, to drive change, to make everything happen. But when you do, speaking to the graduates always remember to be nice to your parents and true to your school. Thank you very much and congratulations.
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