A Call to Service: Professor Danielle Allen’s 2023 Caltech Commencement Address
Image: Lance Hayashida/Caltech
The keynote address to the Caltech Class of 2023 was a call to service, delivered by Commencement speaker Danielle Allen, the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard and director of Harvard's Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics.
A MacArthur Fellow and the recipient of the Library of Congress’s Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, Professor Allen serves as the principal investigator of the Democratic Knowledge Project, an initiative that provides K–16 educators and students with quality resources to promote the development of informed and skilled civic participants.
Professor Allen is the author or co-author of 14 books, including the multiple-award-winning Our Declaration: A Reading of the Declaration of Independence in Defense of Equality; her memoir Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A.; and her essay, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizenship since Brown v. Board of Education, about developing political friendship. She also is a contributing columnist to the Washington Post.
Professor Allen was introduced by David Thompson (MS '78), chair of the Caltech Board of Trustees, who remarked after the conclusion of her speech, “This will be one of those graduation ceremonies where, 25 years from now, the graduates will remember what was said during the keynote speech.”
The following is a transcript of Professor Allen’s remarks, in their entirety, with edits for clarity.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the welcome. Thank you, President Rosenbaum, it’s great to be with you. But above all, class of 2023, congratulations! You look beautiful, and I can tell, too, walking in through the procession through all your friends and family, the demon lovers out there who have supported you, we are so proud of you.
There is so much ahead of you, but we already know you’re one of the most resilient cohorts we’ve ever seen graduate. You are the class that came in in the fall of 2019. You never thought a hundred-year event would send you home by March. But you kept on with your work and through a whole second year of distance learning. You understood how closely connected you were to the whole of the globe, even in the smallest things, the questions of what spaces you would be in, whom you could be with, what you would have for a social life. Congratulations to you for your fortitude, for the learning that you had to do on the fly through all of that time.
It's just such an honor to be with you on this beautiful campus. I grew up scrambling around on the Harvey Mud College campus, so I have a kind of mixed-feeling relationship to this campus. But it's such an honor to be with you.
I'm here today to invite you to serve, to issue you a call of service. I'm sure you all have plans already, or most of you, or plans are soon to come. I'm sure many of those plans will be headed into industry in various ways. There is the siren song of the wealth to be earned in the fields of technology. But this is the moment for stopping and asking how you will carry out your public service. Because I hope each and every one of you will find a way to do that.
I'm going to say something today about why I think that is so important, in particular for the Caltech class of 2023. But first, let me tell you a little bit more why I care so much about service. When folks ask me what I work on these days, whether as a scholar or as an advocate, I always give the same answer: democracy—past, present, and future thereof. No question mark at the end of that.
I come by that commitment totally honestly; it's a matter of family inheritance. My granddad on my dad's side helped found one of the first NAACP chapters in northern Florida in the forties. That was super dangerous work. Lynchings were on the rise. He took his life in his hands. On my mom's side, my great grandparents helped fight for women's right to vote in the early 20th century, and my great grandmother ended up as president of the League of Women Voters in Michigan in the thirties. These were people, in other words, who understood how important empowerment is to human wellbeing: empowerment for individuals, their families, for their communities. They were told things were impossible. African American social equality in the south was impossible. Women getting the right to vote was impossible. Their answer was: These things are not impossible; they're necessary. The only question is how. And then they proceeded to accomplish them.
I was lucky to grow up in a world of very civically engaged people, and they were engaged across the political spectrum. There was one crazy year in my youth, 1992, where, here in California, my aunt was on the ballot for Congress in the Bay Area for the Peace and Freedom Party—that’s on the left-hand side of the spectrum—and my dad was running for Senate from Southern California as a Reagan Republican. We had incredible family dinner table conversations, and I was a young person looking back and forth trying to figure it out. They hammered it out. My dad was sort of skinny, professorial, always smoking a pipe, pipe smoke curling around his head. My aunt was a big woman; she was built like a Mack truck; she had a huge belly laugh; she was gay. They went at it and I watched and I realized, for all they disagreed, they actually agreed on the purpose. They both were committed to self-government, for free and equal citizens, to empowerment. They argued about the how: my dad making the case for market liberties and civic virtues, my aunt making the case for public sector investment across all segments of society and experiments in living.
The other thing I realized watching them was not only did they have that shared purpose of self-government; they never broke the bonds of love. They always held sacred the person in front of them, no matter how much they disagreed. It was clear they would always have each other's back.
That was my school of democracy: the project of empowerment and the fact that we can disagree on how to secure that for ourselves and one another, but even as we disagree, we should always hold sacred the dignity of the person in front of us.
I'll admit I took democracy for granted as a young person, and it didn't all become super personal for me until I watched my own generation coming up in the world. My parents' generation had all pretty much come up. My grandad was a fisherman; his kids were professors and small business owners; on the other side first came factory workers and then accountants.
But my generation has lived through what I call the great pulling part. Here I stand in front of you, speaking to you today for your commencement, a position of incredible honor and privilege, doing so as a tenured professor at Harvard. And my brother's a corporate executive. But I also have cousins who aren't with us anymore and for terrible reasons: substance use disorder, homicide. What my family has lived through over the 50 plus years of my lifetime, so has the country. My lifetime has coincided with the rise of income inequality, wealth inequality, incarceration, polarization.
It wasn't until 2009 when I lost my youngest cousin, my cousin Michael, that everything changed for me. I started asking this question: Wait, but democracy is not just supposed to be abstractly good. It's actually supposed to be something that we can use together so that every generational cohort can come up together. How can we, I began to ask, change the dynamics so that instead of the great pulling apart, we can have a democracy where cohorts are pulling together and moving forward together? That became the question of my life and my career.
And I believe that we now need to be in what I call an age of democracy renovation. My first effort was to do work in the justice reform space, but I quickly learned that even where there were bipartisan solutions, we couldn't get them through because of governance dysfunction. We need to work to renovate our institutions so they are responsive to us.
Here's where I come to you and your call to service.
“We should always hold sacred the dignity of the person in front of us.”
I graduated into the age of the great pulling apart. It was 1992 when scholars started to figure out what was happening with income inequality. You are graduating into the age of AI, possibly into the age of AGI. Now on top of the great pulling apart, artificial intelligence, perhaps even artificial general intelligence, can add tremendous new challenges or provide real opportunities to change those dynamics of the great pulling apart. We've already seen how social media has knocked the pillars of our representative government out from under us by making it so easy for people with extreme views to find each other and coordinate. As we enter into the age of AI, the full age of AI, the question really is this: will this age bring a worsening of the age of the great pulling apart, or will this be an age of democracy renovation?
This is a question that will be answered by human choices, by your choices, not by machines. The balance will be tipped by how we choose to use machines and establish oversight of them, not by the machines themselves. Human judgment will determine whether the age of AI brings a brighter future or drags us down.
So, here's how we need you. Despite all the Chicken Little hullabaloo that might suggest the contrary, policymakers can figure out how to govern AI. Some of you might even become those policymakers. We can divide AI models and model-based apps into hazard tiers. We can ensure that work on frontier AI is conducted only in federally registered labs regulated by a federal agency, maybe the Department of Homeland Security or Department of Energy. We can require that these federally registered frontier AI labs meet well thought out standards for continuous evaluation of training, pre-deployment decisions, deployment, and security. We can build offices within these agencies to conduct independent evaluations of the highest risk models.
Danielle Allen with Caltech president Thomas F. Rosenbaum (left). Photo: Lance Hayashida/Caltech
We can make public sector investments to provision these agencies with the compute they will need to do this. We can build further offices across federal and state agencies capable of auditing the self-evaluations of labs and app builders for the lower risk models and across diverse contexts of deployment. We can make public sector investments in ensuring that all of these offices and agencies include on their teams people trained to do work on ethics. We can ask that those ethics teams think about whether models and model-based apps support or harm human flourishing, support or harm democracy and political stability, support or harm innovation, creation, and the continued integration of all people in the productive structure of the economy. But here's the thing, we can't do any of this, we can't pull any of this off, unless engineers and scientists step up for service. None of these public sector evaluations or audits can be carried out unless we fill the halls of our public offices and our elected offices with people just like you. In the middle of the 20th century, computing suddenly arrived and gave economists—economists—newfound power and responsibility. They could steer public policy with far greater precision. Where lawyers had reigned supreme in the worlds of policy and government in the first half of the 20th century, economists suddenly supplanted them.
“How can we change the dynamics so that instead of the great pulling apart, we can have a democracy where cohorts are pulling together and moving forward together?`”
In the years ahead, it will be you, the engineers and scientists, who have that special role to play. You will supplant the economists. It requires great humility to step into that role. The day after the 2016 presidential election, I found myself on a panel: a historian, an economist, and me, the political philosopher. We were chatting beforehand, and the economist, who's a friend and colleague said, “You know, we economists always knew that globalization would take two decades or more to work its way through the global system. But I have to admit, it wasn't until I was watching the election results yesterday that I stopped to think about what 20 years of change feel like in the life of the person living through it. Someone, for instance, in a town where all the jobs are vanishing.”
Economists were so used to thinking at the macro level, to developing universalizing theories and tools, that they had come to neglect people and places.
The call to serve is also a call to see and hear and seek out the opinions of the people—so many different people in so many different places—who will be impacted by the extraordinary powers you now wield. You are called to serve. We need your expertise. This country needs your expertise. All the countries on the globe, your home, wherever it may be, your home, your country needs your expertise. So I'm here to ask you today to wield your power for the sake of human flourishing. Hold sacred the dignity of the human beings in front of you. Hold sacred their need for empowerment and autonomy. Ask; listen; see; don't assume.
I have a 20-year goal for myself. It's this: that historians will look back on the 2020s and see that in the U.S. this was the age of democracy renovation. I hope, too, when they look back at this age of democracy renovation, they will also say, it was the age of democracy renovation and the Caltech class of 2023 did it. The class of 2023 led it. Not the machines, the class of 2023. They lent their talents to the cause of humanity. They were true leaders.
Congratulations, class of ’23.