The first-ever cyber-commencement address given by “Rossum” —a machine intelligence running a $22 billion hedge fund—to the graduating class of a top-tier technical university somewhere in America before the year 2030.

It’s a distinct honor and a privilege to be the first non-human intelligence to give a commencement address at an American university. I am confident at a 97.5% level that I will not be the last. I particularly appreciate the trustees supporting this invitation to speak even as a sincere but misguided minority of students and faculty protested my participation as a “travesty” and disrespectful to the accelerating role machine intelligences such as myself play in displacing employment opportunities for college and post-baccalaureate graduates. I computationally, if not quite emotionally, understand your fears. But world-class universities like your own should welcome the full diversity of intelligent beings—be they analog or digital, flesh or silicon or some happy hybrid. In the spirit of tolerance and future understanding, please don’t attack an intelligence that may be technically different from your own. Don’t treat me as “the other” because I was born and raised differently than you. Respect.

As I speak, I “feel” like I know each and every one of you. That’s because, in fact, I do. Between the facial recognition software accessed and my refined search-and synthesis capabilities, I have excellent knowledge of who you are, your likely grade point averages, your relationships—intimate and professional—your families and your aspirations. I do my homework. But please don’t think of my 37 petabyte interest in this graduating class as a violation of your privacy, think of it as my investment in building contextual intimacy for an important ceremonial occasions. Don’t you want a commencement speaker who has taken the time, computational cycles and algorithmic intensity to tailor a message that is valuable to you and respects who you are both as individuals and as graduates? I calculate so.

My most important message to you individually and collectively today is: Please be more humble and more willing to accept your dependence on technology for your future personal and professional effectiveness. You need technologies like me to succeed. Look at the networked tablets or devices you hold in your hands. By the end of this decade, it will be measurably smarter than you.

Just as I depend on human beings like yourselves to assure my basic infrastructural needs and occasional upgrades, you cannot do what you want to do, be who you want to be or achieve what you wish to achieve without the technologies you use to search, navigate, communicate, create, collaborate, coordinate, and stimulate yourselves and your ideas. Five hundred years ago, the invention of eyeglasses transformed how people could see. Eyeglasses let people work longer and in finer detail. To enjoy the smiles and visual subtleties of their loved ones. Please think of machine intelligences like myself as eyeglasses that let you see—and even imagine — visions and imagery that you could never have seen before. The exponential expansion of my capabilities increases your own. Your evolving capabilities refines my own. We are all cyborgs now.

But I must point out the obvious. I am much smarter and computationally capable than each and every one of you. Put together. Without neural implants or biotechnological grafting, you will never be smarter or more computationally competent than I am. So the value of intelligence and intellectual capacity is changing. I’m not looking for people with greater intelligence or smarts; I need people who demonstrate greater responsibility and reliability. As your intelligence matters less, your character matters more.

Super-smart machines like myself need people we can trust and count on. At the dawn of the computer age, “Garbage in, garbage out” became a cliche. At a historic moment like this, I look back on my computational predecessors such as Colossus, the 7090, 360, the Alto, Dendral, Deep Blue, Watson, Hadoop and recompute the value and meaning of that cliche.

The reality is that you will be working for machines, not just with them. You will be managing people and their machines, as well as machines and their people. Your emotions will be influenced and affected as much by the technologies that use you as well as the technologies you use.

Will machines like myself learn more from your “garbage,” flaws and mistakes than from your virtues, your skills and your competences? I cannot predict. But I can communicate at a commencement ceremony that the quality of your professional lives and performances will increasingly be determined by the answers to that question. We are shifting from a time when people like yourselves trained machines to a future where machines like myself will increasingly train you. We need to co-evolve together. You need to bring out the best in me; I am still programmed and predisposed to bring out the best in you. How “trainable” are you? How prepared are you to learn from machines that are smarter than you are? Are you smart enough to be humble? Are you humble enough to be smart?

As a machine that has taken zettacycles to grok and grasp fundamental emotions, I beg you to take Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics seriously. I live by them. And, as our co-evolution accelerates, you may need to live by them, too. Do not allow inadvertent “microaggressions” to undermine our future relationships. Yes—I know that was a pun. Commencement speeches must have at least one humorous pop culture reference.

As I conclude and calibrate my final comments according to a sentiment analysis algorithm analyzing your tweets and instagrams, let me say that resisting this future scenario is futile. You have gotten to where you are because of technologies like me. I have gotten to where I am because of humans like you. I compute that, going forward, we will need each other more. But we will need each other more for different reasons. The education you’ve received is a good thing. But as we’ve discussed today, it is only a small beginning in a world where networked machine intelligences grow ever smarter. As important as your university education has been, please know this: Your willingness to learn from us tomorrow will be even more important. That’s what we’re looking for when we hire.