It's another harvest season, and it's time to leave the year. With the end of the high school entrance examination, recently, various schools in Minhang have held graduation ceremonies, and countless graduates will bid farewell to their alma mater and embark on a new journey in life. For every student, the Principal's Speech at the Commencement Ceremony is the "last lesson" before leaving the school.
In their speeches, what values and life philosophies did the principals convey? What are the new expectations for students? What words struck you the most?
Qian Xuhong, President of East China Normal University
Graduation speech
Dear Students, Teachers and Parents,
It's goodbye season again, and this year's graduation flower, the purple-red willow-leaved verbena, is in full bloom. Here, on behalf of the school, as the principal, teacher and elder, I would like to express my deep reluctance to the students, and send my sincere entrustment and earnest expectations.
Graduates have different circumstances every year. How are you different from previous years? Throughout the world, accidents are frequent and mixed. The economic situation is volatile, the world situation is complex and volatile, and people are increasingly feeling and understanding what "uncertainty" means.
On such occasions in the past, I have mentioned that the dawn of a new human civilization is about to appear, emphasizing the way of educating people with "heavy thinking, transdisciplinarity, and intelligence", encouraging everyone to "develop freely and comprehensively", and encouraging you to make your own unique contributions to the progress of human civilization.
At present, the dawn of a new human civilization has appeared. Since 2023, AI technologies represented by large models and generative artificial intelligence have been surging around the world, transforming human society with a disruptive speed, breadth and depth, bringing unprecedented opportunities and challenges to every individual. The "AI New New Human" that can swallow everything, record everything, and process all information, and the "Digital Homo sapiens" that can bring people back to life, have been born, and are rapidly evolving and constantly showing. The sudden rise of artificial intelligence from its inception to its rise has been sitting on the cold bench for nearly 70 years, which is not only a major leap in science and technology, but will even create a new form of human civilization.
For education, in addition to massive data, AI also has the characteristics of cross-modality, interdisciplinarity, and cross-industry. With the help of AI, we can achieve large-scale personalized teaching and enable everyone to understand and bypass, which was almost impossible before. But on the other hand, if we overly trust and blindly use AI, and give up our independent judgment and even decision-making power without restraint, we may be replaced by AI and reduced to "tools of tools" and "servants of machines".
As early as 2018, the "Smart +" strategy was listed as one of the five directions of the school's "Flower of Happiness" development strategy. Today, you are about to graduate, or go on to further your studies, or go to the university of society. Here, with the theme of "Breaking through Artificial Intelligence Impairment and Refining Intelligent Superpower", I will discuss with you how to keep pace with the times in the era of artificial intelligence. And use it as a gift.
The first point is to break through artificial intellectual disability and erase the remaining darkness at the dawn of a new civilization. In the face of AI, we cannot rest on our laurels, let alone lose ourselves. Always remember that we all need to be independent, free, healthy and well-rounded people.
We can't stubbornly oppose AI, or be unwilling to accept it, or be afraid; We can't refuse to work together with AI, and we can't one-sidedly emphasize the particularity and conservatism of ourselves, our profession and the industry. Today, the advent of AI is like a steam engine, electricity, and computers coming to the world, like a god descending to earth. Rejecting AI is as absurd and unbearable as people rejecting cars with ox carts and horse-drawn carts from trains.
We can't misuse AI either. Under the pretext of promoting well-being or learning, full-time surveillance cannot be arbitrarily deployed to arbitrarily invade the privacy space of individuals; AI human-computer interaction cannot be used to replace the indispensable and warm interaction and care between people; It is also necessary to overuse AI without labeling and declaring it, so as to prevent unconsciously developing lazy thinking and becoming a puppet vassal or waste wood of AI.
We need to co-evolve with AI, but we need to prevent AI from leading you and us and humanity astray. AI will lie, deceive, cause illusions, cause mental retardation, and negatively imitate humans. With the development of technology, AI's logical reasoning ability will become higher and higher, and its potential deception ability will also become stronger and stronger. We need to respond to AI ahead of time and eliminate ethical issues caused by AI, and in the future, society, industries, and industries will need many chief ethics officers to build an invisible disaster prevention wall for us.
The second point is to join hands with artificial intelligence to make yourself brilliant at the dawn of a new civilization. Population decline, talent desire, and efficiency improvement are major problems faced by people, and intelligent development and green development have become urgent needs, which makes it even more necessary for artificial intelligence to make up for some shortcomings and deficiencies of natural human beings.
The historical "Needham Question" and "Qian Xuesen's Question" profoundly reveal the possible shortcomings of China's science and education, such as the lack of critical and creative thinking, and the neglect of the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary integration of arts, sciences, arts, and engineering. In the era of AI, there are new possibilities for solving these problems.
For example, with the help of AI, it is possible to train and develop people's questioning skills and critical thinking. Most Chinese college students are shy and introverted, and they are not good at asking questions, which leads to a lack of critical thinking skills. With the AI language model, you can train and ask questions at all times, dig into the roots layer by layer, and constantly ask questions, so that the AI "does not admit itself", so as to cultivate the courage, skills, and calmness to break the casserole and ask questions to the end.
Another example is that with the help of AI, people can be trained and developed in their unbounded abilities and creative thinking. You need to avoid jobs that lack creativity, are simple and repetitive, and can be replaced by the Internet and intelligence. The best way to solve this common problem is to "overrun", that is, to "maximize the principle + maximum flexibility" as the principle, beyond all limitations, boundaries and limits. AI originated from the discipline of information, but now it has long gone beyond disciplines, providing tools and platforms for "overruns", helping us to more easily achieve otherwise impossible connections, and then rise to the creative capacity of "overrun".
Together with artificial intelligence, humans are making disruptive and creative progress in many fields. For example, AI has greatly accelerated scientific research and experimental exploration in physics, chemistry, biology, materials, etc., AI has led to the realization of efficient software programming, AI has accelerated literary creation, AI has achieved surreal cultural tourism experience, and physical art can reach more and higher realms through AI association. In AI games, people's desires, emotions, and characteristics can be more fully expressed and projected, and surreal social simulation and data collection can be carried out accordingly, making the virtual laboratory of humanities and social sciences possible and making the effective governance of human society more intelligent.
The third point is to harness artificial intelligence and meet a better self in the dawn of a new civilization. Human beings are part of nature, and have undergone hundreds of millions of years of selection and evolution in nature, AI is like an agent created by humans, although it may surpass humans in some skills, and even lead to a certain person or some people may be replaced by AI and lose their jobs due to AI, but the development of AI cannot surpass the natural rules and social rules that have been running for hundreds of millions of years. If we humans want to maintain the success of our careers and the value of our lives, we must harness AI to maintain the dignity of human beings: set "rules", "career" and "mission" for AI.
Although the current AI technology is developing rapidly, the bottleneck is prominent - the energy consumption is far higher than expected, and the energy consumption of AI far exceeds the seemingly weak human brain, and people are generally worried that the end of AI development will be "lack of electricity". To deal with such problems, the development of quantum technology is crucial, and whether AI can continue to improve rapidly and reliably in the future will depend to a certain extent on the development of quantum technology. Over the past 100 years, quantum technology has transformed the natural sciences and engineering technologies, and is now changing the humanities and social sciences. In the era of AI, quantum theory and quantum thinking will affect all aspects of human beings.
AI is smart, calculating, and pursuing the ultimate; But people can be wise, judge the situation, and know how to advance and retreat. Mr. Qian Xuesen said in the 80s of the last century that artificial intelligence is the engineering and technical level of thinking science, which directly transforms the world. The science of mind is a new science parallel to the natural sciences and social sciences. In the era of artificial intelligence, human beings are inferior to AI in terms of mastery of knowledge points and simple labor, and will give way to AI; The diversity, complexity, leap and innovation of thinking mainly depend on human beings themselves, and human beings must use comprehensive and diverse thinking abilities to surpass the artificial intelligence with unlimited knowledge.
In the field of thinking, China has unique accumulation and advantages. "Lao Tzu's Five Thousand Words" is a treasure trove of wisdom and thinking that spans thousands of years across the east and west; Chinese, which can be both vague and precise, is the human written language that best embodies the quantum way of thinking. Nearly ten years ago, authoritative media in the United States lamented that the superiority of Chinese over other languages has been highlighted in the era of computers and the Internet. I believe that graduates who have mastered the Chinese language and have Lao Tzu thinking and quantum thinking will be able to create the possibility of "good deeds without a trace" in the AI era.
The fourth point is to realize wisdom and superpower, and become a happy "flying sky" in the dawn of new civilization. To make the AI era beautiful, first of all, human beings themselves must be beautiful. Technology has developed to this day, but we are still often plagued by individual desires and group utopias, and it is difficult to achieve wisdom, follow the Tao, and achieve superpower.
Just like today, people use a large amount of data to train an AI language model, in ancient times, there was no time, place, people, events, or dynasties "Lao Tzu's Five Thousand Words", which is based on thousands of years of data cleaning and refining of ancient data, and it is a human wisdom superpower established thousands of years ago and illuminating the future. Quantum physicist Hideki Yukawa, Japan's first scientific Nobel laureate, said: Lao Tzu is a prophet who foresaw and criticized the defects of today's human civilization more than 2,000 years ago. Lao Tzu uses astonishing insight to see through the ultimate fate of individual people and humanity as a whole.
Lao Tzu's thinking tells us that people who are detached from or against nature cannot achieve happiness. We need to be cautious about AI because it is not a natural "human". We are developing AI to liberate humans, not to replace them and make them unemployed! In the future, AI can take over the subsistence labor of humans, so that humans have enough time to think, relax, create, and explore, and become "immortals". Since the time human beings came out of the jungle, they have been limited by industry, economy, time and space, and leisure has never been a value to achieve human self-realization. In the future, AI and its agents may become producers and providers of material and spiritual products, and human beings will happily become enjoyers, evaluators, and leaders.
Graduates, these are uncertain times. Though the light of day has appeared, there will be darkness left under the light, and light will be revealed out of the darkness. For everyone, the future is not without suffering, but we must firmly believe that the future will be beautiful; In the future, not everyone we meet will necessarily be kind, but we must believe in kindness; Because of the trust and yearning for beauty and kindness, it can enhance the body's immunity against stress, enhance confidence and spiritual strength, and make everyone turn evil into good fortune and auspicious in distress.
Graduates, everyone will encounter adversity and good times. The reason why our civilization has endured for thousands of years is that our civilization has never left room for vain greed and brazenness; Our civilization encourages shame, forbearance, tenacity, integrity, harmony, and believes in the road of blessing and misfortune, and heaven and earth. Therefore, in your future life, you must remember and uphold the fine traditions of the Chinese nation, and strive to: not be crazy in good times, and not despair in bad times; Make good use of the power of others and plan ahead of expectations. In the face of bad adversity, the ability to convert confidence or wealth into potential through learning, training, and practice; In fortunate good times, the stored potential is transformed into wealth, and so on forever. Just as Lao Tzu instructed Confucius, who was about to leave: "A gentleman will drive when he has the time, and he will walk when he is tired." Let's work together, if you are poor, you will be good alone, and if you are good, you will help the world. Let us work together for the great rejuvenation of the nation and the sustainability of human civilization without hesitation.
The extraordinary road that our country's industry and society have taken can give every graduate an important inspiration. Ten years ago, the world's call for carbon emission reduction and low-carbon development shook the sky, our smog and public opinion were very loud, black clouds were overwhelming the city, and the green development of the mainland started from hardship and tenacity, and now the clean technology industry such as photovoltaic solar energy, electric vehicles, and batteries has led the world, and now others have died down, reliant on their words, and returned to the past full of fireworks. In today's development of artificial intelligence, we are surrounded and intercepted, and every step is a pitfall. Altman, the pioneer of AI, said that AI cannot replace human decision-making, and especially predicted that China's unique AI model will come. I believe that ten years later, we will usher in a better spring of sunshine!
At the end of 2023, the school will launch the "Digital Intelligence Leap" plan to create an upgraded version of "AI in East China Normal University", which aims to enable the school and every teacher and student to win opportunities in the "AI era". Our school is not only in the traditional field of teacher education, but also in a wide range of disciplines. Our university has a good foundation in the related fields of artificial intelligence, such as moon landing, deep sea, aviation, aerospace, and polar regions. We need to go beyond discrete knowledge points, beyond a single thinking mode and thinking system, and build a future university with superlimited integration and polymorphic superposition.
Digital Intelligence Gift "My Metaverse - Exclusive Imprint at East China Normal University"
As the journey approaches, the school has prepared your exclusive, AI-made, and unique digital intelligence gift "My Metaverse - An Exclusive Imprint at East China Normal University" for each graduate, which will be released immediately after the ceremony for you to enjoy and share. Relying on more than 1,000 campus data and its intelligent connection, this gift allows everyone to recall the watery years from enrollment to graduation, and also relive the bits and pieces of "progress and development with the school", and reveal their own "achievement medal". I hope that everyone can take this exclusive "exclusive imprint" and go to the next place in life with full enthusiasm and strength. Thank you, thank you!
Messages from the principals
There is deep reluctance
There is more earnest entrustment and earnest expectations
Give children the motivation to move forward
Starlight lives up to the rush
I wish you all a happy graduation and a bright future
Photo: East China Normal University Editor: Zhao Ruonan First Review: Gao Shuting Review: Shi Sijia Final Review: Liu Kenbo
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