AI Is a Meteor. Don’t Be a Dinosaur.

If you’re in the Class of 2026, you likely started at Harvard in fall 2022. In November of that year, ChatGPT was released. The Washington Post described it as “easy to talk to, bad at math.” Fast forward to 2026, when ChatGPT solved a major open problem in mathematics that had stood for 80 years.

From my vantage point as an AI researcher in both academia and industry, I see no sign of AI progress slowing down. If anything, it is accelerating. Talk of AI “hitting a wall” or being just a “fancy autocomplete” is wishful thinking. This is a scary time to graduate from college. But you may not realize that this is potentially also one of the best and most exciting times to graduate from college.

My advice for the Class of 2026 is to embrace AI as a technology, but treat it critically as citizens.

There is no perfect parallel to the current times, but arguably the closest analog is the Industrial Revolution and the related advances in science, technology, and medicine that took place in the 19th and 20th centuries. Since the early 1800s, the share of Americans working in agriculture has plummeted from 74 percent to less than 2 percent. The total population grew more over the last two centuries than in the two millennia that came before them.

Given that the world has become more populous and crowded, one might have expected that jobs and resources would become scarcer. But that is the opposite of what happened. During this time period, GDP grew enormously — not just in absolute terms but even per capita — by a factor of more than 20 in the U.S. and more than 10 worldwide. U.S. life expectancy doubled while under-five child mortality plummeted from more than 30 percent to less than one percent.

As with the Industrial Revolution, I believe that in the long run, AI’s impact can be overwhelmingly positive. AI has the potential to cure diseases, advance science, and help us live longer and better. But there are multiple short-term risks (several of which I work on, as an AI safety researcher at Harvard and OpenAI). In particular, the Industrial Revolution cost many skilled artisans their jobs, including handloom weavers, knitters, and shoemakers. While some found other jobs, many lost income or had worse working conditions.

This time, AI seems to be coming for white-collar jobs, specifically for entry-level ones. It is understandable if it causes anxiety for students. But times of transition actually favor the young.

Over the next few years, I believe we will see significant job losses, job creation, and job modifications. The most successful people will be those who can adapt and use AI tools effectively and creatively to amplify their productivity. Recent graduates are best positioned to do that.

Beyond the economic questions, it is fair to wonder about the meaning of living in a world where we have automated intellectual work. If your passion is Shakespeare or advanced mathematics, you may be able to use AI to dig far deeper and learn more than anyone in history. If you must be the smartest person in any room, I am sorry to say that soon enough you (and I!) will be dumber than your wristwatch.

Either way, it is going to be a strange new world, and none of us can precisely predict it, any more than 17th-century thinkers could predict the internet.

Throughout your time at Harvard, you received mixed signals on whether AI was to be avoided or carefully used in approved sandboxes. My signal to you is clear: make sure to master AI and use it as much as you can. Whether your degree is in English or Computer Science, you should be using not just ChatGPT, but also Claude Code, Codex, and products from cool startups I haven’t heard of. Ask yourself how you can use AI to realize ambitious projects that would have been impossible last year, or even last month.

On the other hand, using AI does not mean exempting the companies that build and use it, as well as the governments responsible for regulating it, from account. You have a right and a duty to make your voice heard in how this technology should be used to maximize benefit for humanity. You should educate yourself on both its benefits and risks. In my view, some of the latter (such as water usage) are overblown, while others (such as concentration of power) receive too little attention. But you should make your own mind, and even if you oppose AI deployment, still use AI to advance your case.

AI can be extremely empowering for those who possess initiative, creativity, and vision, even if they lack experience or capital. I believe that over the coming years, we will see teams of a few young people achieve results that previously would have required large companies with hundreds or thousands of employees. I wish for you to be one of those people.

Boaz Barak is a Catalyst Professor of Computer Science at Harvard and a member of the alignment team at OpenAI.