Greetings, members of the Harvard College Class of 2026.
Claude and I have been working on my remarks for many days. But—given how Commencement season has been unfolding—we decided it would be better for me to go it alone.
Any intelligence demonstrated from this point on is human intelligence.
And all the jokes are human jokes, so feel free to laugh.
I will also accept chuckles and groans. You can’t always get an A.
On Thursday, we will celebrate the whole of our University community, with graduates and their family and friends crowding this space in joyful anticipation.
Today, we gather to celebrate your Harvard College Class—to celebrate you.
You have demonstrated every kind of excellence that we hoped you might when we admitted you—academic, artistic, athletic, entrepreneurial, intellectual, and more. You have contributed to our research mission by exploring the role of dopamine, the dangers of climate change, and the depths of space; poring over primary sources in our libraries; uncovering bias in large language models; revealing the secrets of animals from axolotl to zebrafish; infusing our efforts in every area with your insights and your talents. You have nurtured intellectual vitality and open inquiry, built bridges of understanding throughout our community, and embodied the values of this institution during one of the most challenging periods of our long history.
You have made the University better for having been here. We are grateful.
As you look toward the future, I hope you will also take time to savor your achievements as an undergraduate. Think about your arrival in the Yard, about who you were then and how far you have come. When did you catch your stride? When did you have a genuine revelation about yourself? Which moments do you most treasure? Meeting the caped crusader, the cast of Hamilton, or an intellectual hero you read in high school? Separating your light laundry from your dark laundry for the first time? Snatching a win from the jaws of defeat? Snatching a login from jaws of Okta?
Even now, fifty years after my own Commencement, I could answer questions like those. I remember my time at Harvard College with great affection. There really is nothing like being simultaneously challenged and supported by accomplished and interesting people, nothing like sharing spaces and making memories with peers, nothing like living vicariously through the experiences of classmates and friends. Relationships you started here will last a lifetime, as will the lessons they taught you. Don’t be surprised if the lessons do not become apparent for years. Like fine wines, they will grow in depth and complexity, rewarding you in unexpected ways.
Every graduating College class leaves Harvard under unique circumstances and faces particular challenges. Yours is no different. Just a few months after your first year began, ChatGPT was released. The rapid advance of artificial intelligence has been, for better and worse, the backdrop of your Harvard experience, with the voices of evangelists and critics rising and falling as the use of AI has widened and deepened.
Those who warn of its dangers are far from the first in history to bemoan the ascendence of the new. In 1903, someone we would now call an influencer wrote an opinion piece that appeared in The Pittsburgh Gazette. Humanity, he feared, had entered “an age of little effort.” The embrace of elevators, railways, and telegraphs—the ubiquity of pressable buttons and their near instantaneous effects—was creating, in his words, “a mania for simplification” and a century that “bears upon its face the indelible stamp of melancholy.”
To illustrate his point, he alluded to a literal zenith: “A ballooning station,” he wrote, “is to be established in the little village at the foot of Mont Blanc. A captive balloon will carry tourists in 10 minutes to an altitude corresponding exactly with the summit of the mountain, and having attained this great height without any effort on their part, they can look with derision upon the few intrepid Alpinists who are toiling laboriously in the midst of innumerable dangers up the snow-covered slopes.”
We live today in an age of balloons, gaining perspective in fractions of seconds rather than tens of minutes, dispensing with the toil of the climb in favor of the ease of flight.
There are, of course, places we can only hope to reach by balloon—landscapes too complex and vast for humans to navigate, no matter how hard humans try. If artificial intelligence, generative, agentic, or otherwise, can accelerate the pace of discovery and innovation, revolutionizing how we undertake research and lifting humanity to new heights, then working from within a wicker basket may be not only wise but necessary.
And then there are the landscapes you just don’t need to explore anymore. I may still be able to read a slide rule, and I can use a paper map, but those skills long ago lost much of their value thanks to calculators and GPS. That is what it is to live as progress is being made, as tools are being invented. We can be cautious and skeptical—and we should be—but we can also be grateful for the time that the convenience of our age returns to us.
If there is a question that each of us will have to answer in the years to come, it is this: Which mountains are still worth climbing?
You alone will have to determine what it is that you want to know, which knowledge you are not willing to relinquish for the promise of push-button omniscience. Effort still matters. Scrambling up “snow-covered slopes,” experiencing the slipperiness of almost getting and then the security of gaining a solid foothold, still matters. Just as there was in 1903—just as there is in 2026—there will always be value in “toiling laboriously” to reach new levels of understanding. When you do so, you do more than celebrate the exquisite potential of human beings; you elevate the meaning of your singular existence.
As you choose which peaks to summit, remember that your sure-footed steps will sometimes lead to unexpected terrain, that well-laid plans sometimes encounter unexpected events. If, like me, you ever visited the Widener stacks to avoid procrastinating but then ended up marveling at the shelves and their contents, then you know what I mean. Serendipity—that powerful and magical force—is unprompted. You will not chance upon something that truly delights and surprises you if comfortable curation becomes your way of being. You must be open to the possibility of being wowed by something that you did not expect to find. Such is the benefit of living with a prepared mind.
A century from now, wringing one’s hands over artificial intelligence may seem as quaint as railing against a tethered balloon. I hope that it does. Meanwhile, we will do as humans have done for centuries. We will live on the earth that sustains us, and we will wonder at the heavens that inspire us, seeking always to understand which efforts are worth making, which risks are worth taking —and what constitutes a meaningful life.
Members of the Harvard College Class of 2026: Go forth with eyes open, determined enough to make your own way and wise enough to know when to stay the course and when to choose a different path. May the future be as kind to all of you as you are to one another. May the journeys you take, regardless of the balloons at your disposal, bring you happiness and satisfaction. And may you continue to reach great heights and bring honor to our alma mater.
Thank you.