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<TITLE>Speech at UCB CS Graduation, 2005</TITLE>
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<H1>Speech at UCB CS Graduation, 2005</H1>
<CITE>Brian Harvey<BR>University of California, Berkeley</CITE>
<P>Congratulations -- you made it!
<P>When I was younger, I, like many other kids, daydreamed about starting a rock
and roll band, and becoming the warmup act for the Beatles on tour. But today
I'm in basically that situation, and I find that being the warmup act for Ivan
Sutherland is actually kind of intimidating. So I'll be brief.
<P>In a little while, our department chair will stand here and symbolically
introduce you, the graduating class, to the world. "Here they are, world,
this year's crop of new computer scientists!" The job of the graduation
speakers is the opposite: we're supposed to introduce the world -- "the real
world," as we say in college -- to you.
<P>Technically, it's an exciting world, full of adventure, glory, and danger,
just like the movies. People talk about "nano-bio-info-science," a grand
unification of engineering disciplines. I'm old enough to feel really
impatient, waiting for those cholesterol-eating nano-bots they keep promising
to send through my bloodstream soon. But the dangers are worrying; research
shows that at least some carbon nanoparticles are poisonous to fish. As you
live out your careers, I hope you'll responsibly pursue the glory without
ignoring the danger. All in all, though, I'm proud to present you with the
world of technological opportunity.
<P>I'm having a harder time working up the appropriate enthusiasm for the
parts of the real world <em>outside</em> the research lab. This world we're
giving you is a fixer-upper, I'm afraid.
<P>On March 11 there was a long article in the LA Times on the theme that college
degrees just aren't the career guarantee they used to be. The good news for
you is that Berkeley computer science graduates are still in demand. The bad
news is that, to quote the article, "industries are transforming at a rapid
pace as they adjust to intense competition, technological change, and other
pressures. That means skilled jobs can quickly become obsolete, while others
are outsourced. Educated workers are increasingly subject to the job
insecurities and disruptions usually plaguing blue-collar laborers, but
various factors make it even harder for some educated workers to get back into
the workforce quickly. Though a college education is still one of a worker's
best assets, it's no guarantee that a worker's skills will match demands of a
shifting job market."
<P>Well, there are two ways to think about this: the competitive way and the
cooperative way. The competitive way is to think, "the article is about
college graduates in general, not about Berkeley computer science graduates in
particular." You have a leg up in terms of what you already know, and we like
to think that you're also better prepared than most to keep learning new
skills as the world changes. (Just as one example, we've done our best not to
let you tie yourselves to any one programming language.) But the cooperative
way to think about it is to ask yourselves <em>why</em> the world has to be
organized as a shark pool. It wasn't always, you know; when I graduated from
college, none of my classmates <em>worried</em> about how to protect themselves
against possible future unemployment.
<P>I also have an Associated Press article from May 13, just over a week ago,
reporting the last day of hearings at the Kansas Board of Education as they
prepare to modify their state's science curriculum to require the teaching
of creationism. "State and national science groups led by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science boycotted the public hearings,
saying they were rigged against evolution." This is the board that has
already, six years ago, removed evolution from the required biology
curriculum; now they're taking the next step.
<P>Don't just take this as a joke about the backwardness of Kansas. They've gone
furthest down this road, so far, but the attack on science and rationality is
happening in many states and at the federal level. The federal ban on stem
cell research is one current way in which this religious intolerance affects
that action-movie nano-bio-info future I promised you.
<P>And don't get me started about the state of civil liberties in the United
States today. When I was your age, we '60s radicals, who'd grown up secure in
the protection of the Bill of Rights, often expressed contempt for what we
called liberal values -- in those days, that phrase was an attack from the
left, not from the right. I said I'd be brief today, so I won't drag you
through the complete list of all the things you already know about secret
"disappearances," torture, so-called "renditions" of prisoners by CIA agents
to countries that practice torture openly, FBI infiltration of pacifist
antiwar groups, and so on. The news reports from this country today are like
the ones we found incomprehensible from places like Chile 40 years ago.
<P>You're going to find yourselves in the thick of this problem in your careers.
The modern surveillance state depends critically on the technology we invent,
things like database mining, speech recognition, the "smart dust" project here
at Berkeley. Your Cal student ID, the one that lets you into Soda Hall at
night without even leaving your wallet, uses a technology called RFID -- radio
frequency identification -- that allows anyone near you to read your
identifying information invisibly. The US government now plans to put RFID
tags in passports, so that Americans traveling abroad can be picked out easily
in the crowd by terrorists or identity thieves.
<P>And then there's global warming.
<P>So, we're leaving you a world sadly in need of repair. As usual, it's up to
the young to fix the mistakes of their elders. What can you do about it?
<P>First, of course, work responsibly. These days one of the trendiest places to
work is Google. They've become a verb, the ultimate mark of success for a
company, by providing a tremendous service, connecting people with
information. They're also a huge privacy menace, collecting information
dossiers on all of us that are meant for the relatively benign purpose of
advertising, but will also, I'm betting, turn out to have worse implications
in our rapidly developing police state. Make sure you do work that you can be
unambiguously proud about.
<P>Second, don't buy into the hyper-competitive ideology of our time. Don't take
it as obvious, for example, that your retirement or your health care should
depend on your skills in the stock market. Don't think that to be a patriot
you have to be contemptuous of the rest of the world. Don't think that
terrorism is okay if it's US soldiers, or American-trained foreign allies,
doing it. Don't think that extremist Islam is any worse than extremist
Christianity.
<P>Perhaps you can use your professional skills to help -- help in a
deliberate way, I mean, <em>not</em> just rely on the idea that all technical
progress will eventually become social progress. For example, four years ago
some people I know started an organization called Privaterra. What they do is
bring privacy technologies such as encryption to groups working for human
rights in countries where privacy may be a life-or-death need.
<P>And finally, do some small thing to improve the world right around you. I've
been volunteering at a Berkeley elementary school. It's fun because the kids
are cute and friendly and innocent, but it's frustrating because all that
structure of grades and tests makes it hard to learn and hard to teach. But
just this past Thursday I finally got one particular fourth-grade kid to
multiply two-digit numbers successfully, and I'm still feeling the glow from
that.
<P><ADDRESS>
<A HREF="index.html"><CODE>www.cs.berkeley.edu/~bh</CODE></A>
</ADDRESS>
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