Commencement

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Commencement Address

The 2024 Commencement Address was presented by Mr David Swan. David graduated from Huntingtower in 2008 where he went on to RMIT to graduate with honours. He worked for The Australian for over 8 years and is currently Technology Editor for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald.  David has been awarded Best Technology Industry Journalist numerous times and received a highly commended in the prestigious Quill Awards. You may have heard David on the radio or seen him on TV where he is regularly sought for commentary on what is happening in the world of technology both at home and abroad.  When he is not breaking stories, David enjoys punk shows, jazz records and playfully antagonising his cat. Please find an edited version of Mr David Swan's address to the school below.

Technology is coming. Arguably, it’s already here. Artificial intelligence chatbots are replacing our colleagues and in some instances our friends. Scientists have developed meat that can be grown in a lab from a cell, with no animals required. And a made-up digital currency called bitcoin…is doing not much of anything. 

Being the technology editor for The Age, and previously for The Australian, I've had a front row seat for the last ten years to how technology is upending everything. It's reshaping our economy, posing new questions we haven't properly grappled with yet, and it's creating jobs we couldn't have conceived of even five years ago. It’s also allowed us to create millions of memes about the annoying habits of your husband, most of which my wife has sent to me. 

In many ways we haven’t yet caught up to these technologies, which are progressing and moving faster than we can fathom. And that has led to a widespread fear and uncertainty around what innovations like AI are going to mean for our future, which is looking more crazy and to some, dystopian, by the day. 

Sure, right now, in 2024, there's a lot we don't know about the future. But I can tell you one thing that I know for sure. It’s going to be our humanity that gets us through. 

Generative AI is only a few years old. But us humans have been evolving for hundreds of thousands of years. The best bits about AI are not about how they make our essays have better grammar or help us write more effective blog posts. They're in the time that it saves us, time that we can use to spend with our families or on doing more interesting, fun, human things.

Take social media. Social media has allowed us to connect like never before but it's also important to remember it's often not a true reflection of real life. The best parts about TikTok are not the perfectly synced up dances that go off without a hitch, they’re the blooper reels, or the videos when your cat walks in front of the camera. The best things about Instagram are not the manicured travel photos, they’re the imperfect photos of when your car broke down and now you’re ugly crying. The imperfections are the best bits. 

Sure, these times of progress will be messy. They always are. For those in the audience maybe wishing you were born a decade or two earlier, in simpler times, I can tell you from experience the 90s and early 2000s weren’t all they were cracked up to be. We didn’t have the worlds entire history of recorded music accessible via Spotify, we had to walk around picking one album to listen to at any given time, put the tape in our walkman, which would jump around if you stepped too quickly. 

I’m having a baby in about two months and the world he’s about to enter is certainly going to be very different. His internet is going to be way faster. Just because we’re entering more uncertain times doesn’t mean we should be scared.  If anything we should be confident in the ingenuity, and the humanity that has got us so far. 

I had an awesome time in high school, but the times I remember from Huntingtower were not the perfect times. They weren't the times I spent at the computer perfecting my already excellent English essays. The moments I look back on the most fondly were wrestling on the footy oval, wearing a dress on muck up day, dancing with Ms Savage at the dancing with the staff competition, and that time I was told off by the then-principal Mr Bowen for doing a bomb into the pool during house swimming. 

It's the same for my career now too. Journalism is a messy, very human thing, I have to be constantly deciding who to interview, what questions to ask and then how to write up the story. I have to decide what stories to write in the first place and what not to write, because it might cost a relationship and the story is not worth it. Someone might tell me a secret and then say ‘don’t report that’ and then I have to decide whether I should or not.

Sometimes I get stuff wrong in a story and I have to go in and correct it. And that’s ok. It's like Wikipedia, sometimes you need to edit your mistakes. We all make mistakes along the way but that's part of what keeps life interesting. 

And even though I've spent the last decade or so writing about technology, documenting how it's changing our lives and interviewing the companies making it, the most interesting things about my career so far aren't actually the technology at all. They're the people. They're Mike Cannon-Brookes, the billionaire co-founder of Australian software giant Atlassian, who I mostly just text with about basketball and why my team sucks so often. They're Melanie Perkins and Cliff Obrecht, the people who started design software company Canva, and whenever I see them we talk about how their baby is going, and they ask how my family is. It's that time I spoke to Elon Musk, but I have nothing nice to say about him, so I'm not going to say anything. My best technology stories are the best stories about the humans themselves. No one cares if a processor is 3 gigahertz or 2 gigahertz, or if a new iPhone is two millimetres thinner than the previous model. What they care about is how it's going to change their lives. 

While technologies like AI have had crazy advances in recent years and have the potential to improve our lives in many way, they still - and always will - lack the emotional depth, creativity, intuition, empathy, morality, sense of purpose, and humanity that makes us each so special. And I want you to remember to that as young people coming through, you're not just users of technology. You also have the power - and the responsibility - to help build it, too. The old guard are going to need you and your fresh ideas and perspectives to help shape the future. 

I want to leave you with the message that sure, everything changes all the time, whether that's tech or life more generally, but our relationships and the best things about being a human are a constant. Be your best self, control what you can control, and everything will tend to turn out ok. Oh and don't use ChatGPT to write your essays, everyone will be able to tell you've cheated and whatever you come up with yourself will be better and more original anyway. Thank you very much. 

Mr David Swan

Commencement Addressor