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I think many Swarthmore students often try, immediately after graduating, to accomplish a critical task at exactly the wrong time in exactly the wrong way. I am not referring to your next jobs. Many of you will be doing jobs next year that you will be underpaid in and overqualified for. Tough luck on that, but it’ll get better eventually.

What I am thinking of is that many of you will try to do good and change the world for the better. And I do not think that you should. I think that this is exactly the wrong time for you to try and you will try to do it in exactly the wrong way. In trying, you misunderstand what it is that you are best qualified to do in the coming years, and you misunderstand exactly how it is that you go about doing good in the world [. . .]

If you set out to change the world for the better a week, a month or a year from now, with will and determination, with a sense of commitment and dedication, you are like an agronomy student setting off to practice your best cow-milking technique on a jaguar. It is the wrong time, but more importantly, it is the wrong attitude. People whose only goal is a total, overall or general change to the world for the better are people who end up disillusioned at best, and at worst, become the tools of–or weapons of–more cynical and calculating people.

What you are qualified to do tomorrow, or the next week, or the next year–not just qualified, but superbly capable of doing–is bearing witness. You are qualified to see the world as it is, to observe it meticulously, without blinders or filters. You are qualified to tell the truth, with rigor and discipline. This may come as some news to you, given how conflicted and ambivalent academics have become about what constitutes truth, and for good reason. Truth is not simple. It is not black and white. It is never predictable. Two people can witness the world honestly and end up seeing something very different, and both visions can be equally true. Truth is often a matter of perspective, and is often found through insight, inspiration and creativity.

Truth is hard, not easy. You can see it, if you will only allow yourselves to. That’s what critical thought does for you. That’s what ethical intelligence really is.

Your job now is to open yourselves as fully as you can to the richness and mystery of the human condition, to its irresolvable contradictions, to the dangers of knowledge. Don’t look away because you’re not supposed to see something. Don’t let anyone bully you out of being curious, or having a passion for knowledge. Don’t ever convince yourself that you have an obligation to lie, or to conceal the truth, to simplify things for reasons of political expediency [. . .]

If you look at the people who really have changed the world for the better–because most injustice is systematic, and really does require systematic attention from organized groups of people fighting for what’s right–you’ll see that most of them didn’t set out in life with the activist’s version of a “will to power”, determined above all things to change the world for the better. Nelson Mandela just wanted to escape an arranged marriage and live his life the way he wanted to. Gandhi just wanted to be a lawyer. If you want to change the world, just wait. The opportunity will find you at the right time, and when it does, your commitment to change will be organic, a part of your life rather than something outside of it. It will arise from within the conditions of your journey through the world rather than from hubris or fierce neediness.

FFXII isn’t the most fun game to play. It’s drawn out, labour-intensive and opaque. Whether deliberate or not, though, the results work. All these disparate elements converge on the idea that if you do ever have the opportunity to change the world, the choice will be unclear, and it will not give you everything you want. If nothing else, this deserves praise for being so profoundly at odds with the ideology running through so much of game design that the aim should be to reward or satisfy the player.

Okay here’s another story: the current era of formal verification has been dominated by the cost of proof. Specification has taken second place—we can’t even verify systems with simple specs, so why worry about everything else? Now, thanks to advances in modern AI, we may soon live in a strange world where proofs are cheap and abundant. If that happens, I think we will quickly verify every compiler and microkernel, then find that we’re stuck. Even Claude can’t tell us what to want.

[. . .] It’s a formal verification cliché that writing the specification tends to uncover most of the bugs in a system. To me, this suggests an analogy between specification and programming—both are tools for expressing what we want. In one way, this is a pessimistic thought: no tool can remove the burden of clarifying our ideas. But also, it gives me some hope. Programming is very difficult, but through careful tool design, we’ve made it available to hundreds of millions of people. With luck and skill, perhaps we can do the same for specifications.

. . . even highly automated systems, such as electric power networks, need human beings for supervision, adjustment, maintenance, expansion and improvement. Therefore one can draw the paradoxical conclusion that automated systems still are man-machine systems, for which both technical and human factors are important.