by
Peter Schwartz ’68

Commencement Address
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
Harkness Field

Saturday, May 16, 2009

Dr. Jackson, Trustees, members of the RPI community, honored guests, parents and family and most especially all of you graduating today. Thank you for the opportunity to speak to you today. And especially thank you Dr. Jackson. I am honored to be here, as any RPI alum would be. But I am especially honored because I so admire Shirley Jackson, first because of what she has done for RPI, but also for what she continues to do in the world. I regularly meet her in the world that I work in, of high-level policy, whether it is in her role as a Regent of the Smithsonian or at the World Economic Forum at Davos or now, on President Obama’s Council on Science and Technology. Not only are her contributions huge and obviously highly valued, she enhances the reputation of RPI everywhere she goes. People think, “What an amazing school RPI must be, if such a remarkable person is its President.” In my world, she makes me look good as an RPI grad. So thank you again Dr. Jackson.

Commencement is one of those few moments when it is important to take the long view and reflect on what your life is about. As Shirley mentioned I am a futurist. Companies, governments and nonprofits pay my company, Monitor Global Business Network to help them understand where their world may be headed tomorrow, so that they can make better decisions today. The art of taking the long view is based on a study of the past and probing the possibilities for the future especially those inherent in advances in S&T because they are the sources of genuine novelty and surprise.

So in thinking about this address it seemed natural to take a brief look back before looking ahead. Though the history I want to begin with is not a look at grand forces such as geopolitics and scientific revolutions. Rather I want to offer a reflection on my time at RPI that may still be of use to graduates rather than incoming freshman.

The question I want to address in the first part of my talk is what surprised me about my education later in my life. There were at least three key people in my RPI experience that changed my life. And I would never have anticipated that on graduation day as President Richard Folsom handed me my Aero degree.

The first was Herb Hodgson who was the Protestant chaplain on campus. Herb and I got to know each other in the activist movements of the time, civil rights and peace. And I found him a remarkable inspiration as a human being, his sense of empathy and deep insight into the inner workings of other people. A few years after graduation, Herb called me out of the blue inviting me to come join him in a residential education experiment at the University of California at Davis. Not only did that get me to California, my next three years working with Herb taught me profound lessons on how to work with others.

At some point in the next few years, probably by the time you are thirty (for me it was 28) you will have to make a life trajectory decision that no one tells you about. Are you mainly going to work on your own or work through others? Many engineers, scientists, artists, poets, writers have great lives working mostly by themselves. But there are many things you cannot do on your own. If you want to lead research teams in larger organizations, or design and construct new buildings or make movies or start new businesses the skills of human collaboration are essential to success.

Herb Hodgson gave me the important tools that would enable me to become a leader at SRI, lead the scenario team at Shell and ultimately to lead the founding team of a successful company. In our days of marching along side each other against the Vietnam War I would never have imagined that Herb would guide me to the tools of successful entrepreneurship.

The second RPI person was a history Professor, Merritt Abrash, better known as Mickey. He not only became a good friend, he opened a realm of ideas that led me to my ultimate career. Mickey’s course introduced me to thinkers like Lewis Mumford and Joseph Wood Krutch in books like Technics and Civilization and The Modern Temper. Mickey led me to start thinking more deeply about the ways in which societies change and develop.

A few years after graduation and further reading and exploration it seemed to me that we were not very good at guiding how our societies should evolve into the future. We were not adept social navigators. Every once in a while we got bursts of remarkable creativity like the authors of the American constitution, but for the most part things seemed to develop in not very thoughtful or farsighted ways especially in recent years. Decision making in the public and private sectors became ever more short-sighted, dominated by election cycles and quarterly results. It seemed to me we needed better ways of making long-term decisions. So I set out to either find or develop those tools.

As it turned out there was already a nascent field of scenario planning practiced at a few places like RAND and Stanford Research Institute, a few small organizations and a few big companies like Shell and GE. They had developed the tools for improving long term decisions by exploring the different possible scenarios for the future and seeing how our choices might fare in them. How wise were we in our imaginary hindsight? We could rehearse the future without having to crash and burn companies or countries. Scenarios, realistic stories about the future, are like wind tunnels for testing our decisions.

Early on I got an important piece of advice in the spirit of the long view from Dick Raymond, founder of the Portola Institute, “If it doesn’t take fifty years it isn’t worth doing?”

I have spent most of my working life collaborating with others in the development and spread of this tool. That’s what I did at Shell, that is what GBN is about, that’s what most of my books are about. Today scenario planning is the most widely used tool for strategic thinking in the world. I consider it a great success that it only took thirty-seven years not fifty. And it was Mickey Abrash who first opened the door to this pathway into my future.

The third RPI person was the most surprising of all, Professor Joe Duffy. Prof. Duffy was the Department Chairman of Aeronautical Engineering and Astronautics and taught Aerodynamics. He was the hardest Professor I ever had, not because he was a bad teacher. Quite the opposite. His subject was extremely difficult and he taught it at a very high level with no intellectual compromise. Indeed I only got through it by promising never to design any flying vehicle that would carry human beings. So you can be sure that you are all safe flying home. I had nothing to do with your aircraft. So how was Duffy important?

In 1976 a few years after I joined the futures studies group at SRI we were asked to undertake a major study on climate change. The issue then was global cooling as the world had actually cooled from around 1960 to 1975. ERDA, the predecessor of today’s Department of Energy wanted to know whether we were going to need a lot more energy to keep ourselves warm in a freezing world.

As we got into the research it became clear to me that the climate models had not yet adequately reflected the complex dynamics of turbulent fluids like the real atmosphere. Suddenly those painful hours spent mastering fluid mechanics came into focus. That body of knowledge allowed me to make a unique contribution to my research team. We were able to see that the climate tended to wobble around the average, and that this was most likely just a brief swing toward colder. And in fact the world started warming again the next year, 1977 and has been warming mostly ever since. We may go through cooling just ahead, even though warming is the long-term direction.

Duffy not only gave me the tools to gain insight into the complex dynamics of the climate, he gave me two important threads in my life ever since. Because of that early work on climate change I continue to be heavily involved in the issue and currently spend a great deal of my time on it. And it gave me a real appreciation for complexity, which continues to serve me very well.

Herb, Mickey and Duffy gave me the tools to build a successful business, take the long view and appreciate the complexity of reality.

Before taking the long view it is worth spending a few minutes on the near future, about the world you are graduating into. Undoubtedly the economic and financial crisis we are going through is having a significant impact on the job market. Though, as you will find, many of the best companies continue to recruit and hire young staff even in a downturn. We do. We understand the need to constantly replenish the pipeline of talent. What actually happens is that less productive people my age get pushed overboard.

Never the less it is tough out there. So how long will it go on? Well the Obama administration appears to be doing the right things from a policy point of view but the uncertainty is still great. Recovery could come fairly quickly, say later this year. Or it might take longer say another few years, as late as 2011 or 12. We are in a turbulent environment that resembles white water rapids. When you are in the rapids you have to paddle a bit faster than the water to be able to steer. Otherwise, you will be swept along by the currents to wherever they carry you.

Other than an elegant metaphor what do I mean? Even if you can’t do exactly want you want in the short run it is a good time to position for the long run. In the midst of today’s turbulence the best strategy may be to build strengths for the future. The way you do that is further learning and experience. School, volunteering, different kinds of jobs, travel and more are all ways of building those strengths, of paddling a bit faster than the rapids, so that when the recovery comes you are even stronger than when the crisis began. I graduated into a similar job market, especially for Aero, so I served in the Peace Corps in Ghana and taught in a high school in Philadelphia, before joining Herb in California.

Now let’s take the long view. What’s the scenario for the next half century, when you will be as old as I am. What happens if we get the future right? It is not actually hard to imagine. So imagine with me.

At the most obvious level it will be a world of peace, prosperity, freedom and sustainability. The new technologies of clean energy, transportation and manufacturing will have made us vastly more productive and much less polluting. We will have made enough progress in reducing the drivers of climate change that we can look forward with some confidence. With a new bio-industrial paradigm our economy will come to resemble the richness of a forest ecology rather than a factory floor. High economic growth has meant that the income gaps in the world have narrowed so much that another four billion people will have been lifted out of poverty. To be sure there will be many more of the glittering wealthy of the world, but even more whose day to day life is prosperous and secure that were once desperately poor. And the prospects for their children will be even better. Access to a high quality education will be everyone’s birthright. New centers of knowledge creation have developed all over the world, even beyond China and India to the Middle East and Africa. Advances in medicine will have reduced the devastating consequences of disease and accidents as well as extending a youthful old age. Smarter, better human beings with a variety of forms of enhancement are walking the earth. Transportation and communication technologies will link the world in ever more intimate networks of engagement. Our knowledge of the mysteries of the universe and our ability to explore it both from the vicinity of the earth and deeper into space will still be a source of challenge and inspiration. I expect to spend at least one vacation in orbit on the Virgin International Space Station after Richard Branson buys the ISS. And of course our knowledge of human biology has given us vast new powers over the human future. What to do with that power will be central to the debates of your time.

In 2050 not all nations and peoples love each other, not all lives are happy, but the threats of violence and war are diminishing and the misery quotient of the world is on its way down.

So that gives you some glimpse of what is possible. But the future we aspire to is not a done deal. We have to make it happen. Just as a century ago in 1909 there was a enormous potential for the future with all the radical new technologies at hand, the automobile, the airplane, the telephone, radio, anesthesia and electricity, but the world blew it and got forty years of horror, two world wars and a great depression. In the post World War II era the potential was similarly great, jet airplanes, computers, television, satellites anti-biotics and many more, but we got it right and ended up with a half century of peace and prosperity. So what we do matters.

That brings me to the moral purpose of a privileged education. Of the many millions of young people on this planet only a relatively few get the opportunity for the kind of education you and I have had. So you are free to pursue your interests wherever they make take you. But you have an obligation to pursue that interest in such a way that you make the world a better place than you found it. There are almost an infinite number of ways to do that, large and global and focused and local. But pursuit of private short-term interest alone will not produce the kind of future I have described. Whether the next half-century resembles the first half or the second half of the last century is very much in the hands of your generation. Is the future chaos and war or peace and prosperity? Your capacity for innovation and leadership will largely determine which scenario actually unfolds. So how do we make it happen?

How can you help create that future?

You are fortunate in that the world needs your skills and abilities more than ever. Delivering on that future means rising to meet a number of major challenges. Particularly as a result of the election of Barack Obama and the great scientists like Steve Chu and John Holdren he has brought to Washington, despite the economy, you are now paddling with the current.

So I have organized my thinking into the challenges that can organize your future. Ten things worth doing with your life. If you succeed not only will the world be a better place but there are at least a few Nobel Prizes and a fair number of fortunes to be built out of the following list.

The first and most important challenge is energy for the long term. That means it must be non- polluting and inexhaustible. That has been the dream of harnessing the energy that powers the sun in fusion power, which has proven to be very hard to achieve. We need other avenues in the event that fusion fails. None of today’s renewable sources of energy like solar and wind are adequate to meet humankind’s needs over the long run. In the short run, we must do everything we can to reduce CO2 emissions to diminish the impact of climate change. There are of course many opportunities in doing just that, as we need all the cleaner energy we can get right now. But we need something new for the long run and it will require new physics, new chemistry, new materials, new biology or likely some combination. Indeed using biology to produce fuels may be the most promising direction of research and development. Bacteria that excrete gasoline molecules built from CO2 they have absorbed from the atmosphere may be the ultimate recycling system.

Our energy systems are also technically very inelegant. We mostly burn hydrocarbon fuels like coal, oil and gas or use radiation to make heat and in doing so really create low value energy and a big mess. The hydrocarbon molecules in coal, oil and gas took nature millions of years to make and burning them is the lowest value we can make of them. We need more elegant solutions to producing energy to meet humanities long term needs. Solar power is of course much more subtle but still inadequate because of the physical limits of the sunlight that reaches the earth. Perhaps solar power plants in earth orbit might do it. Beaming power from space is a huge technical challenge, but one worth achieving if possible.

The second thing we need is a bio industrial revolution. The way we make most every thing we need is extremely inefficient and polluting. We either cook them or slam them together or tear them apart. The biggest breakthrough in the microchip industry was, for example, the beautiful way of manufacturing them in large numbers cheaply. Today we need to learn to make things the way nature does. She takes decades, even centuries to make something as massive as a giant redwood. We speed up the process by operating at high temperatures and using a lot of energy. The burgeoning field of synthetic biology may be the first steps toward this new industrial revolution.

If we succeed in these first two challenges then it is likely that another three to four billions of people can live well and sustainably on this planet.

The third great challenge is the brain. As my generation gets older we are at great risk of becoming a brain dead burden on all of you. For your sake and ours we need to learn enough about the brain to reduce the loss of faculties that come with aging. Fortunately this is one of the arenas of research that is being driven rapidly forward by new advances in instruments to read what is going on in the brain. Sustaining memory, eyesight, and mental acuity all are imminent possibilities.

When I was graduating from RPI it was nearly universally believed that India faced mass starvation well before the turn of the century. Instead due to major advances in agricultural productivity they are net food exporters. If people are hungry today it is either because they live where they cannot grow food or they cannot afford it, not because we do not produce enough food. Unfortunately in recent years even though the population growth rate has slowed, the rate of food productivity growth has slowed even faster. Moreover climate change, water and energy issues all make the challenge of feeding the world even more heroic. So finding the next great advances in food including reduced water and other input use is worth focusing your life on.

In the last year humankind passed a major milestone. Over half of us now live in cities. But those sprawling urban complexes leave a great deal to be desired. We need new urban designs, new buildings and new forms of transportation to build the sustainable cities of the future. In America alone we will build almost ten Chicagos in this century. And in China and India many more. What an opportunity to get it right, to learn from the mistakes of the last century. And to lay down urban patterns that may endure for centuries. There is plenty of room for the architects to make their contribution.

Now as for the management and business majors you may mostly want to get rich but fortunately you also get to help end poverty. How do you do that? Drive economic growth and create jobs. Build great enterprises or manage the ones we have even better to make our economies ever more productive, innovative and in need of many skills. When the demand for labor is great the people at the bottom of the income ladder get a larger share. It is how people climb out of poverty. It is happening in China and India today at a furious pace and needs to happen in more places including, once again in America. That’s the job for business.

The arts are among the highest expressions of our unique human identities. Culture makes life worth living. The EMPAC is a perfect example of the potential for carrying the arts into the future. We need that fusion of the technological, spiritual and aesthetic dimensions of our lives if the future is to be bright and beautiful. So weave a new synthesis of art science and technology.

In case you are counting this is number seven. Humankind has been evolving ever since we became Homo sapiens. Over the last ten thousand years among the dominant sources of evolutionary pressure has been the environment we have made, our cities, our food, our medicine, etc. But our evolutionary course has been unintentional and without design. Now as our biological tools and understanding are increasing dramatically we have the potential of shaping our own evolution by intention. The age of intelligent design may actually have arrived. We can choose to let evolution happen at random or we can take hold of it and reshape humankind’s future. For example it may be possible soon to extend youthful human life by decades and even centuries or regenerate any part of the body that needs repair or replacement. So become intelligent human designers.

Build the next great instruments. Science and technology advances with our tools. The telescopes like Hubble and atom smashers like the new Large Hadron Collider have been the constant source of major new discoveries. Give your fellow scientists and engineers better tools, more sensitive sensors, better imaging devices, ways to observe living cells, quantum computers, and many more. Build the tools that will lay the foundations for long-term knowledge creation.

Finally for me the dream of space is still alive. I admire those entrepreneurs like Elon Musk whose company Space X is making space flight cheaper and simpler. But we need much more and Space X proves you don’t have to be Boeing or Lockheed to make a contribution. The X Prize was a great example of how progress can be made in novel ways. Maybe Arthur C. Clarke’ space elevator is the right vision for the future. So find ways to radically lower the cost of getting into space with less pollution.

If we meet these ten challenges the world will almost certainly be a much better place when you are my age. You will be able to look back with some sense of satisfaction at a profound record of accomplishment.

Despite being an aging hippie and seriously concerned about the environment I have come to learn that there are no limits to growth other than human creativity. We live in a knowledge economy; in fact knowledge has exceptional value in nearly realm. It is new knowledge creatively applied that is the source of human wealth.

Every knowledge base is needed; everyone here from engineers to scientists to architects, artists, managers and entrepreneurs.

You will undoubtedly find a few surprises like I did.

So sign up for one the challenges.

Let me say that I aim to be a measure of your success. I anticipate that someone among you will give me at least an extra few decades of youthful life. So a century from now I expect Shirley who will be on her third or fourth stint as President of RPI to invite me back to give another commencement address.

So take delight in the surprises, paddle fast, take the long view, save the world, get rich and invite me back a hundred years from now.