Advice for students (and myself)

Experiment, now

I recently returned as the guest of honor awards ceremony speaker at my alma mater, St Joseph’s College, Newtown. I took the opportunity to reflect on how much has changed since I graduated.

I am extremely optimistic about frontier technologies. But they also demand something new from us. As a father of young children, the weight of understanding those demands feels heavier.

So my advice to the students, and indirectly to myself and my children, was simple. Don’t let these technologies wash over us passively, treating them as mere conveniences. You have agency. So, quickly find out what matters to you, experiment, and do it now.

Here’s the speech:

Good morning, and congratulations! Today I don’t want to give you the usual award-ceremony platitudes. Instead, let me explain why the world you are in is different, and better, than the one I graduated into in 2008. The difference, around 16 years later, are the frontier technologies that are available to you, and the pace at which they are changing.

Here’s what I mean: when I graduated, I had a flip phone. It could barely send a picture message, and struggled to connect to the internet. Google was still a few years away from releasing their cutting-edge AI that could identify cats in videos. Netflix was still delivering physical DVDs by post in the United States.

Today, in your pocket, you have access to AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini that can explain quantum mechanics, code for you, or help you to think. You can do this at your own pace, at home — or right now while I’m speaking — and without permission.

This would have seemed like science fiction to me.

When I had questions about economics I followed a prescribed path. I asked my brilliant teachers (shoutout to Ms Maltese), read textbooks and wikipedia pages, and went to university. I climbed the ladder of formal education. Probably too high.

Today you can still climb that ladder, and many of you will and should. But aside from this you also have a parallel path - direct access to bespoke and deep information. You don’t have to wait and you don’t have to stay in the curriculum.

Want to understand how SpaceX lands rockets? Ask an AI model to explain the physics to you. Want to know how cryptocurrencies work? Get an AI to explain cryptoeconomics to you. Trust me, it can.

So here are three bits of unsolicited advice for you to navigate this period of exciting and scary disruption.

First, find out what you care about. AI won't give you a purpose, or a passion. It won’t tell you whether you like maths, politics or music. You need to find out what you like, on your own. Use your formal education here as a launchpad for those interests. Think of your time here at Joey’s as a menu of options for your interests.

Second, experiment. Go down as many rabbit holes as you can on the internet. Particularly go down the ones that your teacher didn’t teach you, or won’t talk to you about. Go down the ones that aren’t on any exam. This is where the exciting things are.

Many of you have already mastered one crucial skill - making ChatGPT’s writing sound like your own for an assignment. Your teachers might not love me saying this, but that actually is a valuable skill. The even more valuable skill, though, is learning to ask these AI tools the right questions.

Maybe you want to start a business as a plumber, architect or engineer. Figure out how to use these tools to do scheduling, find common business mistakes, and write financial plans.

As CEO of OpenAI Sam Altman recently said - we will soon see our first one-person billion-dollar company. That scale used to require big teams and big finances. Not anymore.

But you’ll only find out by experimenting.

Third, do it now. Don't ask permission. Don't wait for your parents, teachers or future university professors to tell you what to do.

In frontier technologies there is an open secret: no one really knows what’s going on, you just have to jump in, and keep up.

If some parents and teachers are uncomfortable now, good. We are in a period of disruption, and it’s only going to get faster. One of the most dangerous things you can do right now is play it safe. And so I urge you to find out what you care about, experiment aggressively, and do it right now.