Good Morning, Graduates!

For some of you, the future might work out fine. It just depends.

University of Central Florida campus.

You may have read about the commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida last week. Gloria Caulfield was repeatedly booed and shouted down by the graduates for sounding too wide-eyed and bullish about artificial intelligence and the excitement of “living in a time of profound change.”

Dude, read the room. Her audience has been watching in horror as AI displaces whole categories of human labor. What occupies their thoughts is living in a time of profound unemployment.

The speaker, who is the real estate developer behind a wellness-themed planned-community utopia called Lake Nona, spends her days like a modern Dr. John Kellogg, glorifying a lifestyle of fitness and health for maximizing happiness and human potential. Thing is, sales and marketing execs don’t by nature lift up their utopian dreams to double check for dystopian underbellies. In Dr. Kellogg’s case, at his 19th century Battle Creek Sanitarium, he stuck with his hunch that people benefit from chewing every mouthful of his special corn flakes 80 times and submitting to four machine-powered enemas a day. They didn’t benefit, particularly, and UCF graduates are rightfully nervous about being Kellogged. Hence the booing.

“Ok,” Caulfield said, realizing she’d misjudged the situation, “I struck a chord.”

Nope. Not that either. Rather the opposite. She’d struck a nerve. That’s the thing about technological revolutions. Along the way to reordering economies and societies — whether with steam engines, or cars, or aeroplanes, or wireless, or rocketry, or nuclear fission, or Uncle Milty, or the computer, or the internet, or Facebook — revolution leaves blood running in the gutters. One man’s progress is another man’s ruin. Ask former toll booth operators what they think about EZ Pass.

So, then, what would have been some solid commencement advice? Perhaps something between “Skip forward cheerfully with a song in your heart!” and “Run for your lives!” How to frame the future for fresh recruits?

Historically, even among humanity’s greatest thinkers, there is no consensus. Some have embraced change, others catastrophized it. For instance, Socrates, the Greek moral philosopher from 24 centuries back, is quoted by his student Plato as warning against a new technology called “reading and writing.” Unlike the oral tradition, Socrates believed, the written word was a suppressant of memory. He also thought writing encouraged sophistry, relying on specious arguments unchallengeable in the moment, to project “false wisdom.” Socrates, like subsequent critics of rock and roll, dismissed reading as if it were one of the mindless kids’ fads.

Luckily Plato was one of the kids. Socrates’ ideas live today thanks to Plato’s written dialogue, The Phaedrus.

Then there was the early 20th century novelist Thomas Mann. In his masterpiece The Magic Mountain, a loquacious Italian intellectual called Settembrini surprised the main character Hans Castorp with a soliloquy about the virtues of technology “in helping mankind reach moral perfection.”

“As technology brought nature increasingly under its control … by creating new lines of communication – developing networks of roads and telegraph lines – and by triumphing over climatic conditions, it was also proving to be the most dependable means by which to bring nations closer together, paving the way for people-to-people exchanges, destroying prejudices, and leading at last to the universal brotherhood of nations. The human race had come out of darkness, fear, and hate, but now it was moving forward toward a final state of understanding, inner illumination, goodness, and happiness – and technology was the most useful vehicle for traveling that road.”

Thumbs up, no doubt, from Gloria Caulfield. By the way, like Dr. Kellogg’s Battle Creek spa, the setting for Mann’s novel was in a Swiss sanitarium where Castorp and Settembrini were TB patients being treated with a combination of cutting edge medicine and quackery.

Published in 1924, the book was set in 1914 on the eve of WWI. So, Mann himself — humanist and rationalist though he was — could not have been so sanguine as his character about technology as a civilizing force. For all the advancements in human comfort and capability, Mann saw firsthand in Germany the toll of “progress” in 20th century upheaval, notably the Great War. The trains, gramophones and x-ray machines were not inherently civilizing. Technology changed the idiom, but not the impulse, of inhumanity.

Probably I should mention a third viewpoint on scientific discovery — namely that the human race has finished with all that.

William Thompson (aka Lord Kelvin) was a monumental figure in 19th century mathematics, physics and engineering. But not necessarily an oracle. Lord Kelvin is often quoted as saying, “There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”

Oracling turns out to be a tough racket. There are other real-life Settembrinis. Remember Francis Fukuyama, whose 1989 treatise The End of History prematurely declared the triumph of liberal democracy over authoritarianism? Oops. Sometimes thinkers don’t think quite far enough ahead. I mean, it’s not all their fault. The future hasn’t happened yet.

Thus, I have taken the liberty of rewriting the top of Gloria Caulfield’s commencement address.

Parents, professors, deans, trustees and most of all graduates. Within the hour, the doors will open, caps and gowns will be shed, and the Class of 2026 will walk out into a new world of dizzying change.

Many of you, and many of earth’s 8 billion souls, will prosper beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations. Many more will be consigned to a hell of insecurity, poverty, tyranny and techno apocalypse.

Therefore, I implore you. Do your best as citizens to moderate and regulate man’s worst impulses in a world governed by machines. You will be accused of being Luddites and snowflakes and leftist thugs. But please do two things: 1) let conscience always be your guide, and 2) try really, really hard to be in that first group. Nobody wants an AI enema.