Dear _____, Here's the Address on the occasion of the FIT graduation ceremony. 29 April 1998 Monash University. Prof C.S.Wallace , ..... .. ...... .. ....... . And a possibly edited version of this appeared in Melbourne's Herald Sun newspaper (www.heraldsun.com.au), some time in May 1998, on p 19. : : (This is also reference [282] in ``Foreword re C. S. Wallace'', from the Computer Journal, Christopher Stewart WALLACE (1933-2004) memorial special issue, Vol, 51, No. 5, Sept. 2008 [http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/comjnl/bxm117].) : : --VbJkn9YxBvnuCH5J Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: attachment; filename="__________-_______.__" Address on the occasion of the FIT graduation ceremony. 29 April 1998 Monash University. Prof C.S.Wallace First of all, let me congratulate you on your success. The disciplines in which you have graduated are demanding, and many of you will have found the going pretty tough. As one who taught in Computer Science for 30 years, I know that the study conditions and facilities you have worked with have not been ideal, and certainly not as good as the Faculty would have wished. In a field changing as rapidly as Information Technology, it is not easy to design our courses to provide you with the knowledge and skills which will best serve you in your future careers. What seems to us fundamental and important in the discipline today may prove in a decade or two to be a minor aspect of interest only to a narrow specialty, or even totally irrelevant. Just as likely, you will find in the coming years that some topic your lecturers barely mentioned has become central to your work. The best we can hope is that we have given you a good start on what will be a life of adapting to change, and pehaps, causing and directing that change. At the very least, I hope that your studies have helped you to think critically and creatively, to question the assertions and ideas presented to you, and to sift from them the grains of truth and good sense which even the worst of your courses will have contained. I would like to offer you one final notion before you go, whether grain or chaff is for you to decide. There is a story told in economics called "The Tragedy of the Commons." Some centuries ago, much grazing land in Europe was not owned by individuals, but held in common by all the farmers of a village. Each farmer could let his animals graze on the common land. Clearly, a farmer who could acquire an extra animal would benefit, as he could fatten it on the common and then sell it. But as every farmer pursued this course, the commons became overstocked and over-grazed, and no animal thrived, so all the farmers ended up worse off than if they had not increased their flocks. In modern times, a close parallel is the over-fishing of fish stocks in international waters. For any fishing boat, the best profit comes from catching as many fish as possible, but for the fishing fleet as a whole, this is disastrous. These are just two simple and obvious cases where the individual's pursuit of his own best interest leads to a bad result for the community of individuals. Notice that even if every fisherman is well aware that overfishing will bankrupt the industry, and himself with it, his best strategy is still to catch as much as he can. This remains true whether other fishers are overfishing or showing restraint. It is not just in the use of a limited resource such as a common or a fish stock that we find a conflict between the individual and the general good. If my country goes to war, my joining the army will have negligible effect on the result, but greatly increases my chances of being killed, so my personal interest is best served by staying out if I can. Volunteering is simply irrational, and is so whether we win or lose. Yet we owe our present good fortune, perhaps our lives, to just this irrational, altruistic decision by those youths, many without even children, who enlisted in our defence in the great wars, and whose lives and deaths we have just recalled on Anzac day. Similarly, since you have now completed your degrees, I can reveal that your rational choice while at Monash would have been to cheat in every assessment where you could do so without much risk of detection. Of course, had you all been so rational, the reputation of the degrees which you have earned would be in tatters, but none the less, dishonesty would have been the best policy whether others cheated or not. Yet the very existence of our society, and even the survival of the pre-civilized tribal groupings which preceded it, rely on just such altruistic behaviour: persons acting for the common good even when the act is against their own and their children's individual interest. The web of laws and regulations which we expect and accept as the axioms of a democratic society are largely an attempt to codify and enforce at least a minimal kind of institutional altruism, a balance between individual and societal values. The balance swings as ideas and ideologies change, but if it swings too far from altruism, we risk losing the general consent on which a free society is based. I find it hard to see the element of common good in insolvency laws framed to protect the wealthy from the legitimate claims of their employees. You may well be wondering what this notion of altruism has to do with computing. There are three reasons why I am talking about it. First, the emergence of altruism in conflict with the individual interest is an important factor in our lives, yet will not have been much discussed in your education, and is worth some thought. Second, the logic of altruism, the rationality in the community interest of behaviour which is irrational for the individual, is an intellectual puzzle which is not at all well understood, at least for those who do not accept a religious imperative. What little research has been done on the subject has come as much from within the computing community (where it is called the "prisoners' dilemma") as from students of anthropology and animal behaviour. Computer-based simulations are beginning to uncover the ground rules under which altruism and co-operation can survive against purely self-interested and competitive behaviour. Third, it happens that information technology has benefited hugely from altruism, and may suffer badly from the present fashion for promoting deregulation and competition as the guiding principles for society. Considering the commercial importance and scale of the computing industry, a surprising number of the seminal developments in its technology have come from non-commercial sources. In many cases, the sources were explicitly "altruistic" organizations such as publicly-funded or subsidized universities. Other contributions have come from individual workers and teams within commercial organizations, but were apparently developed not as a profit-directed project but rather as a by-product or even "hobby" activity, for instance, the Apple computer. One recent example is the world-wide-web, which was first created as an altruistic exercise by a worker in a publicly-funded research establishment for Particle Physics, and which uses communications technology developed for free by dozens of groups from a basis funded as a USA defence project. The computer on which I do most of my work uses an operating system which is freely distributed by Berkeley University, and which I have found to be considerably more reliable than its commercial rivals. Indeed, a recent survey of users suggested that free software, developed for personal interest or use and now given away through altruism, is typically more robust and productive than commercial products developed for profit. The typical use of a PC in a business or government environment costs more for the software than for the computer itself. Given that good software is very difficult and expensive to develop, yet costs practically nothing to distribute to any number of users, it is certainly not rational for an individual to develop for himself software which he can buy for a reasonable sum. We can only thank the altruistic idiots who do it nevertheless. But viewed from the larger perspective of a country as a whole, the equation changes. Even a small country like Australia spends hundreds of millions annually on commercial-developed software, almost all imported. One might suppose the government of such a country would see some virtue in encouraging, indeed funding, the development of commonly-used software for free distribution to all who wanted it. The potential savings to the community as a whole might be substantial. However, such altruistic behaviour seems not much esteemed in individuals, and almost unheard-of in governments. Even in publicly-funded research and development agencies, a proposal to develop software for widespread use is far more likely to be viewed favourably if accompanied by some financial support by a commercial organization which may privatize and sell the results. A proposal to give the software away for the public good will rarely succeed if the software is seen as having monetary value. When I first came to Monash 30 years ago, one of the great potentials I saw in computer technology was the ability to predict the consequences of large-scale actions. The building of a large dam or industrial plant, the reform of banking or tariff regulations, the signing of a major treaty, are actions which can have widespread consequences often not forseen at the time. Computer power is now sufficient to allow some of the complexity of these effects to be predicted, as is now being done for instance in studies of the greenhouse effect on climate change. Unfortunately, relatively little investment has been made in such predictive tasks. The good which might flow from them is wholly public, and cannot readily be privatized for an individual profit, so it is not a priority. Rather than altruism, competition has been enshrined as the highest virtue in our public lives. The consequences are not always pretty, as for instance the incredibly wasteful duplication of investment in cable networks and mobile phone infrastructures of recent years. My parting wishes, therefore, are not only that you prosper in your future lives, and find reason to value the time you spent at Monash, but also that you temper the competitive zeal you will certainly need with an appreciation that co-operation is also rewarding, and altruism not to be despised.