Food in General is Bad for the Environment
There were the remarks I gave to the incoming students in the Plan II Honors Program at Freshman Convocation, 2025.
Hello class of 2029! Wow—2029. That sounds like a made-up year from a sci-fi novel. We’ll get there.
I do have some personal remarks to share with you this evening, but first, I have the honor and privilege of making a very exciting announcement. Earlier this afternoon I had the last of a series of meetings with university leaders and some of our partners in the private sector, and I can now share with you something that’s been very “hush hush” for the past several months. I’m sure you’re aware that UT Austin is providing every student with access to a suite of AI tools to supplement and enhance your learning. As part of that same commitment to embrace and integrate emerging technology into the college experience, UT has entered an agreement with La Mettrie Automata, a robotics company based in Paris, and our campus is going to be the field trial facility for their new cybernetic product, the Model B Automaton.
Exciting! Robots!
Not only is UT going to be the test market for the Model B, but the first group of UT students who get to beta test these things are going to be you—the Plan II Honors students. McCombs really wanted them, but I advocated for you and I was persistent and persuasive. [Hold for applause] You’re welcome.
Technicians are doing final checks right now and in a few minutes, they’ll be disconnecting the units from their charging stalls in the basement of the San Antonio Street parking garage and walking them over here. At the end of this meeting tonight, you will each be issued your own Model B unit, which is yours to use for the semester.
You don’t have to do much. The robots will log all their activities to the cloud and report any problems, and if a unit needs to go offline for a day or two it will send you an alert in the app, and you can schedule service. We don’t want this process to be burdensome for students at all—the technology is supposed to make your lives easier and better, not be some kind of hassle. Each unit has a QR code engraved on its face area (you’ll see), so you’ll scan that and download the app, sign the user agreement, and you can watch the tutorial videos and learn how to take care of your robot and how to use it. So I’ll just hit a couple of key bullet points, and you can get the rest of the details from the app.
First of all—not gonna lie—they do use a lot of power. If you’re charging them at home, you can plug the charger into a standard 20-amp, 120-volt wall outlet and they will reach a full charge in about 10 hours, which gives them about five hours of operating time. You can also bring them to the San Antonio garage where there are rapid chargers, which cut the charging time down to about two hours, but there are limited stalls available, so you’ll want to use the app to see whether a charging stall is available before you head over there.
I’m sure some of you have concerns about the environmental impact. And some of you probably have questions about costs, too. If you live off campus and pay your own utility bills, you’ll probably want to use the rapid chargers on campus, which are free (I mean, somebodyhas to pay for it—but not you). As far as the carbon footprint goes, there are a bunch of things you can do to offset energy consumption and emissions. You can do an energy audit and see where you can make some adjustments. Maybe you’ve got some “vampire appliances” that draw current just from being plugged in, even if you’re not using them. You can wash your clothes less frequently. You can take colder showers. You can eat less meat—food in general is bad for the environment, but meat is the worst. You can turn your lights off earlier instead of staying up reading. There are a bunch of ways you are probably wasting resources, and you could adjust your lifestyle a little bit to accommodate this new technology.
One safety note—again this is covered in the app, but needs to be highlighted. In the prototype phase, some units caught fire. That shouldn’t happen under normal usage. What some users were doing was covering their unit with a blanket or putting it in a closet at home, because they didn’t like that it was always watching them. Covering the unit or putting it in an enclosed space is a fire hazard and a violation of the user agreement. Units should be left in an open area in your dorm room or apartment, with space for air to circulate around them. It’s not a clothes rack, guys—it’s a half-million-dollar piece of equipment!
Eventually, this technology is going to have all kinds of applications. Imagine sending in a squadron of autonomous robots to dig through rubble after an earthquake. No doubt they will eventually be saving lives. Right now, though, the Model B units are still in beta, so they have limited functionality. Nevertheless, we think that you’ll be impressed with what they can do.
Before anybody asks—these are not for physical intimacy. The Board of Regents was adamant that that functionality be disabled.
The headline feature is that they are strong, and they don’t get bored or tired or distracted. They are good at tasks requiring strength, endurance and focus, and those are areas where college students could use a little help. In the same way that using AI to do your homework will help to strengthen your minds, these robots will strengthen your bodies.
Some context: before they were defunded in February, a team of researchers at the Harvard Graduate School of Education had been studying the health and fitness of college students, and their initial research showed that about 83 percent of full-time undergraduate students were not getting sufficient exercise. You’ve heard about the infamous “freshman fifteen.” The myth there was that students were eating less healthy food at college—but it turns out that’s not the whole story. The bigger problem is that your lifestyles are less active. And that’s understandable—you’ve got homework to do, social organizations to run. Many of you volunteer with charity orgs or get internships. Who has time to go to the gym? Well, we might have solved that problem. Your Model B comes with robust programming for strength training and cardio. You can schedule your bot to go the gym every single day and get in a 45-minute workout before you even get out of bed. I have been using mine all summer and you can’t argue with the results. I definitely couldn’t bench press 600 pounds before.
And that’s not all. For those of you who are looking to date or even just make new friends at UT, the Model B has a “proxy mode” where it will go hang out with someone and then let you know if they’re cool. That way you don’t waste time with people who aren’t cool.
The data collected during this trial period will help improve the next generation of automata. Eventually, with the integration of improved AI and improved robotics, almost any human task can be delegated to a machine. Someday, a model F or a model G will not only read books for you, not only synthesize ideas for you, not only formulate arguments for you, not only write code for you, not only exercise for you and go on dates for you, but it could also listen to your spouse, play with your children and pets, decorate your home, practice your violin, and garden your tomatoes. In my experience, life has been a series of challenges—that’s what most of life is, a series of challenges—but with sufficiently advanced technology, you can opt out of almost all of it. Leaving you free to enjoy whatever’s left.
Okay, so that’s my exciting announcement.
I believe I have just a few minutes left, and my role here today is to say something memorable and inspirational at this, the outset of your undergraduate career—to impart some advice that can help you get the most out of these four years. That’s tricky, because I’ve only just met you. I don’t know what you want to do with your time. But I was once where you are today—a freshman entering Plan II. If I could speak now to my then self, this is what I would say. Perhaps you might find some of this applicable.
I’d say: Self, Matt Valentine of 1996, listen carefully. I have this one, very brief opportunity to help you live your best college life.
You were admitted to this honors program not because of what you know but because you demonstrated a capacity to learn. That’s why you’re here—to learn—which requires listening. You will feel obliged, among all these smart people, to demonstrate at every opportunity how smart you are, to prove to everyone that you belong here. This is not a good use of anybody’s time. In future parlance, it is “cringe.” Don’t do that. Participate in dialog, yes, but listen more than you speak.
You will expend an enormous effort over the next four years to graduate with a perfect 4.0 GPA. Literally nobody will care. It never comes up again—not in graduate school, not in professional life. Even mentioning it now feels like a weird flex. Think about what you’re giving up to get that one extra point on an assignment or an exam—are you missing a night’s sleep, or neglecting a personally fulfilling creative project, or skipping important activities with your friends or family? Are you pestering the shit out of a professor, with whom you might otherwise have a lasting rapport? I’m not saying don’t aspire to do well in school. I’m saying that having excellent grades isn’t the same thing as having an excellent student experience.
You are entering college at a weird moment, when an ascendant technology is changing the world. This year, as an incoming freshman, you will get your first-ever e-mail address, and for the first time, you will have a computer that can connect to the Internet. This is the beginning of the dot-com boom. Smart-sounding people will tell you that the world is about to change irrevocably, that the skills you have been honing will have no place in the new paradigm. “You better learn HTML,” they’ll say. “You better learn JavaScript.” They are right that the world is changing, but wrong in almost every specific prediction about what the new world will look like and what will ultimately be important and valuable in your life. Later, this period will be called the “dot com bubble.” Billions of dollars of valuation will vanish like fog in sunlight. So don’t despair about emerging technologies. The more time you spend interacting with a machine, the more valuable and meaningful authentic human interactions will seem by contrast.
Decades from now, when you are me—when you are a middle-aged man—someone you care about will tell you that something you said to them all those years ago in college wounded them. I won’t even remember that you said it. Be careful with your words.
In a couple of years, the President of the United States will be impeached. (I’m referring, of course, to Bill Clinton.) You will be repulsed by the entire debacle—the President’s inappropriate affair with a subordinate, his lying under oath, and the performative outrage of his political opponents—almost all of whom will go on to have their own sex scandals in the years ahead. At 18, you would prefer not to talk about politics—the subject feels at best boring, and at worst hopeless. But you should choke down that distaste and use this time, in this place, as an opportunity to hear the various perspectives of your classmates. To have conversations about what people want, need, and expect from their leaders. It will be important later.
Two of your college friends will not survive their early twenties. A nice clock hanging in the Plan II Office memorializes one of them. Their deaths are not your fault, though you did know they were struggling. You will try to help them, but as well-intentioned as you may be, you are not equipped to provide mental health care or substance abuse counselling. You will listen to them, you will support them, you will respect their privacy and keep their secrets. But in hindsight, what you wish you would have done was to walk them across campus to the Student Services Building. What they need is more than you alone can give them. There are resources here. Use them.
Similarly, I’d encourage you—Matt Valentine of 1996—to seek some help for yourself, too. At this point in your life, you are proud of your big brain and not willing to admit that there might be anything wrong with it, medically or emotionally. But I know all the weird shit that goes on up there. I know that, after you lock your car, you go around and check each door to confirm that it really is locked. That’s not the behavior of someone with immaculate mental wellness. You’re going to have to deal with your own issues eventually, and sooner is better than later. Asking for help is an act of strength, not a gesture of weakness.
Lastly, I can’t overstate the importance of comic books over the next three decades. Marvel Entertainment will declare bankruptcy in a few months. All their intellectual property—the Avengers, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, etc., will be acquired by a company called Toy Biz, and they’ll reorganize under the name Marvel Enterprises. You’re going to want to open a brokerage account right now and buy stock in Toy Biz. I know you don’t have a lot of disposable income, but scrape together what you can and buy at $22. Those shares are going to split several times and we’ll end up owning a stake in Disney. If you could also pick up some shares of Apple, that would be good for both of us.
Goodbye and good luck!
