The View From Mission Hill

As if we didn’t have enough real problems staring us in the face, a recent wave of concern about something that, assuming no undisclosed breakthroughs have been made, is not really an immediate worry has fascinated the media. Artificial intelligence (AI) and the threat it poses to humanity’s long term existence. Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking have each expressed their fear that we are about to open a new Pandora’s Box of evil if we are not cautious in our efforts to create computers capable of doing what humans are – truly thinking. And their not coming up with happy thoughts.

Now, I’m not sure if these gentlemen are all just going to the movies too often or are indeed privileged to results of lab work on AI that the rest of us are not, but gosh guys, settle down. You’ve been the cheerleaders for science and technology for so long now that when you get scared we can end up a little terrified. Besides, there are several problems I can see with your computers and robots eliminating us from the face of the Earth worries.

First, there would seem to be the big question of whether we can even create true AI in computers. Yes, we can give them the ability to play one heck of a game of chess. Yes, provided with all the information on streets and weather and traffic they can guide the most inept traveler to his destination. Yes, they can process computations at light speed which humans can’t. But these are all the actions of a well trained servant, not a master.

Second, why do we assume that the ability to think at a faster, more informed level would be the key to great evil? Were that the case, we should be watching each of you very carefully for indications of desire to rule the world. It is an unfortunate reality that we have been taught to suspect those who have greater capacity for thought and to fear their actions.

Third, if we are so brilliant as to be able to create true capacity for thought in our devices and still fear their ability to not only serve but adapt, create and dominate, it would seem a simple solution would be to create a fail-safe requirement. A sort of Turing test. But in this case it would not be to tell whether a computer was the equivalent of a human in its responses. Rather, it would be a test to see what the device could do with the knowledge it had processed. A  “Hawking” test perhaps. An assurance that, although the devices had reached a superior level of efficient thought, they were really, without the aid of human activity, unable to act upon any untoward notions.

This, unfortunately, leads us to the one really valid portion of your fears. The involvement of the human element. We have throughout our history done an incredibly good job of trying to remove ourselves from the picture. We are great at war and everyday homicide. We have too much desire for us and too little sympathy for them. We are our own greatest enemy and, sadly, probably our only savior.

If you are so concerned about intelligence, might I encourage you to worry less about the “artificial” and more about inspiring the supposed original version. Failing that, we are, I fear, ultimately on the road to destruction long before the rise of the intelligent machine.

…On Endless Professional Sports Seasons

I can’t believe I’m the only one who sees the length of season for every major American professional team sport to be just agonizingly long. Baseball starts when it’s too cold to play in most northern cities and continues so long that the threat of snow and ice has returned for the last playoff games. Football begins when there is every possibility of players dropping dead from the summer heat and runs until there is a good chance for them to suffer frostbite. Hockey gets played so early in one year and so far into the next that it’s only in the last couple of seasons that the league has promoted a few outdoor games to remind fans that the sport was intended to be played only in the winter.

For full disclosure I will mention that I am not a big professional sports fan. If I was to awake tomorrow to the news that the industry had mysteriously vanished  overnight I would shed nary a tear. I will admit that the first baseball game of the year is a welcome sign of the coming of a new spring. But 162 games later it’s long ago lost any attraction. The first football game is a good omen that the heat of summer is about to end. By the time the Super Bowl is played I’m celebrating the end of such a seemingly endless slog. The appeal of professional basketball escapes me from game one on and by June I can’t see how anyone could care who wins.

As I hinted above, my thought is that each sport should go back to its seasonal roots. Baseball players are supposed to be “the boys of summer” for crying out loud. So play the game from say, June through September.

Football is a fall activity. What’s wrong with playing from Labor Day until Thanksgiving.

Hockey should begin play when the official average daily temperature in Winnipeg is low enough to allow outdoor ice rinks and end when it gets too high in the spring. (No, I don’t care that all that money was spent on indoor rinks and eternal ice.)

I don’t really know what a good starting point for the basketball season would be, but it should certainly end when the weather is nice enough for everyone, players and fans, to go outside and get some fresh air and sunshine before they are once again glued once again to their various devices watching the next endless baseball season begin.

As the small sliver of a waxing moon was setting last night it took on a deep yellowish color. The rising sun this morning was a spectacular orange disc like something out of a science fiction movie. Both were caused, we are told, by the amount of smoke put into the atmosphere by the wildfires raging in the western United States and Canada. The effect is indeed magical but what creates it we know is horrific; so we do the best we can to fight the fires and minimize the damage.

The “fires” burning in the Middle East and elsewhere are equally horrendous and considerably more tragic. At least we have the consolation that most wildfires are the result of lightning strikes or unintentional human action. The smoke from the shelling of a community, the downing of an airliner, the explosion of a suicide bomb in a crowded marketplace, is the product of purely premeditated deeds. Only the sadly misguided could find any beauty there and we should be doing all we can to extinguish these as well.

Perhaps the most dangerous to us, however, are the potential fires that haven’t really produced any flame as yet. The smoldering areas of concern within our society which produce a whiff of smoke that we continuously try to explain away as acceptable.

Do we really not recognize the gradual burning away of any faith in our ability to govern ourselves through the fanatical dedication to party ideology and politics over the good of the country and its people on the part of those we elect to Congress?

Does no one smell more than a trace of smoke when even mediocre performance will net a CEO more income in a year than the most highly skilled and productive employee of the same firm will earn in her entire career?

Don’t we wonder about the slight haze that blinds whole communities to the long term danger of proposed drilling for this or mining for that when there is the promise of a relative handful of jobs being promised?

There are intense fires to be fought. There is a pall of smoke that makes them easy to identify. They can’t simply be ignored. But it is time to take more seriously the unseen, but potentially disastrous, dangers we insist on disregarding.

The last few years have brought a flurry of activity by astronomers searching for, and often finding, evidence of the existence of planetary systems around stars other than our own. Most that can be detected with current technology are not judged to provide a planet of the necessary nature or that is in what we would consider to be a habitable orbital zone for life as we know it.

Who knows, however, what a few more years of effort may bring? It’s not impossible that we might be able to pinpoint a star like ours, for there are many, surrounded by a group of planets like ours, for there is no reason to believe that we are somehow unique, including a planet in a habitable sweet spot much like we occupy. Since the underlying reason for seeking other worlds like ours has been to discover a likely place for life to exist beyond our infinitesimally small portion of the universe, there would certainly be speculation on what forms of life might inhabit such a planet.

As a longtime reader of science fiction my hope has always been that we would indeed encounter a second source of life simply for the changes it might bring to our outlook on our own. That they would be a far older civilization than our own. That, as in all hopeful fiction, they would be familiar enough in form for us to be willing to learn from them how a successful future might look. That we might quite simply be changed in a positive way from the experience of finding that we, the product of our Earth, are all one in the probable presence of many.

As an equally longtime student of history, however, my greatest fear is that we will discover that a far older civilization than ours has progressed no further than we in its dealing with important issues. That some of its “people” may still be considered inferior for no explicable reason. That a small minority, through the luck of birth or timing, may be allowed to own and exploit the resources which should be the property of all who occupy the planet. That demonstrable knowledge and science will still be pushed aside in favor of what amounts to no more that superstition, wishful thinking or deeply entrenched but unproven philosophy.

Any discovery of life beyond our planet, even if it happens tomorrow within the nearest of systems, will require further decades of effort to communicate with and, if successful, learn what they have to offer. In the meantime, witnessing our own failure to progress on our own planet, all we can hope for is that they do not turn out to be just like us.

I like to consider myself as being somewhere on the liberal side of the philosophical scale. I believe that government can be a force for good in our lives. I support the ongoing efforts of those who seek a more equal distribution of the rights and benefits a prosperous society can provide. I believe that there are better days ahead if we just adopt an all-for-one versus an everyman-for-himself attitude towards societal progress.

But, at the same time I firmly believe that there is a place for a well defined and well executed (no pun truly intended) death penalty procedure in human society. I’m not talking about the biblical stoning of unfaithful wives or the Wild West lynching of suspected horse thieves, but rather the justifiable self defense of society as a whole from the threat of the pathological killer, the irredeemable zealot of whatever stripe.

Recent court decisions and trials in progress have brought our struggle with the death penalty back into the spotlight. What else does society do with a woman who has been found guilty of the truly gruesome, and apparently premeditated, murder of her boyfriend?  If found guilty, what else is the appropriate sentence for a man who holds three women captive, and forces who knows what perverse demands on them for a decade, with no signs of remorse?

“But our judicial system has proven itself incapable of making these judgments“, death penalty opponents will cry, and they are, in some ways, right. The past is full of racially and economically spurred instances of a rush to judgment that, in some cases, are only now, well after the fact, being overturned.  Indeed there are far too many examples of unacceptable miscarriages of justice.

But that does not mean that we are not obliged to make the justice system a respected one, that we are not obligated to correct the faults of the past and move forward to a more enlightened day. Yes, enlightened is the sense that we have faced the need to control the threat to our common safety. Enlightened in terms of accepting the fact that in a population of over three hundred million we are inevitably going to be faced with a certain percentage of dangerous individuals which will need to be dealt with. Dealt with, not in an emotional frenzy, but in the very judicious and rational way that our system of justice is called upon to oversee. For if we do not accept that systems decisions regarding the very important issues facing society, how can we be expected to accept the less “meaningful” and therefore easier decisions it might hand down. Is the jail sentence that is handled badly for an accountant improperly charged with embezzlement any less “meaningful” to her life than a murder conviction?  

We have come to accept the use of deadly force in the guise of military operations, police responses to crime that often involve injury or death, and, most recently, the de facto acceptance of civilian decision making on who is to live and who is to die as we are each encouraged by the forces of the gun lobby to arm and defend ourselves against the overly armed threat that our cowboy heritage has engendered.  

We will need to make a decision soon as to whether we are confident enough in our system of justice to live with its decisions or if we will constantly question and weaken that system. There is a need for society to remove individuals that now threaten it and will continue to do so. We must trust the legal system we have or create a better one for we are all subject to its life changing power. Not doing so is a prescription for anarchy.

In light of what I am about to say, let me make it clear that I fully understand the shock and sorrow that the people of the city, and many in the country in general, felt in the aftermath of the bombings and the subsequent manhunt in Boston. We have come to expect such events in the city of other faraway places and are barely moved when several dozen innocents are killed almost daily by such acts of terror. We are not, as a people, accustomed to such events occurring in our streets. We are, for all the warnings we have had to be vigilant about and billions we have spent to protect ourselves from faceless terrorists from other lands, not mentally prepared for two virtual boys to cause such havoc.   

But at the same time it must be acknowledged that this was indeed only the rather amateurish work of two very amateur terrorists. Two novice terrorists that fortunately lacked the imagination to understand what terror the random detonation of five or ten of their crude devices would have caused. Two terrorists who were so enamored with their work that they insisted on staying close to the action so that they might witness the effect of their devices firsthand and then seemingly did everything they could to be sure that they were identified as the perpetrators. They were, in the end, not much of a threat.

What I am saying is, let us not lose any sense of proportion on what has happened here. Yes, the bombings were a shock, but should we really be surprised that Boston remains “strong” and somehow goes on as a viable community? If so, what is to be the fate of poor West, Texas that was so devastated by a much more overwhelming blast that may yet turn out to be the result of preventable negligence and yet was pushed to back pages of most newspapers and barely mentioned for days because of this fabricated existential threat to Boston and its, our, way of life?

As for the reaction of the conservative media, i.e. Fox and Rush et.al, and all too many members of Congress, your knee jerk reaction towards immigration in light of the bombings would be laughable if it were coming from some small town station or town council but is instead yet another embarrassment to you and your colleagues.

That we should, as you call for, look to revamping our immigration standards on the basis of eliminating broad groups from consideration because we just don’t trust, or somehow like them, is ridiculous. All too many of you and the rest of us as well, would not be in this country today if only those welcomed with open arms had been admitted in the past. The broad brush with which you are willing to paint immigrants, especially those followers of Islam, as dangerous on the basis of two sadly twisted youth is fascinating in light of your recent refusal to bother gun owners with any further oversight when thousands of them prove themselves deadly to our citizens every year.   

Let us try to work harder at keeping a proper prospective on what are nearly impossible to predict or prevent and, though tragic, not really end-to-life-as-we-know-it events and our responses to them.

For those somehow unaware, this past weekend during that holy of holies for golfers, the Masters tournament, the most riveting story not surprisingly concerned Tiger Woods. In this case though it was not the usual will he win or how well will he play story but rather the discussion of whether, after an incident during Saturday’s round, he could justify being allowed to continue playing at all on Sunday .

I did not see the rules infraction Mr. Woods is said to have committed, and admitted to, in placing his ball in a more “advantageous” position for a second attempt at a relatively short shot to the green after his first had caromed off the flag stick and landed in a water hazard. Though I am certainly not an expert on the surprisingly complex rules of golf, when I first heard about it, the two stroke penalty he received from officials seemed sufficient punishment for his crime. Those calling for him to disqualify himself and withdraw from the contest appeared overly vindictive.

But the more I consider it, the more I see that indeed he should have done the honorable thing and left the field. For golf, perhaps alone in sport, is a game based on behavior controlled by honor. By and large won or lost on the basis of individual performance, for there is no defense charged with stopping a player from doing well, a golfer’s behavior is policed not by squads of referees but by the golfer and his conscience. Certainly there’s the standard joke about amateurs’ brazenly cheating when playing with their buddies on Saturday afternoon. In principal it’s wrong but in its context such behavior is roughly equivalent to a fisherman exaggerating a little about the size of the catch he made when nobody was around. It’s lighthearted, relatively meaningless and lets the worst performer at least keep up with the best to save face.

In big-time professional golf the picture is different. Players rely upon the unwavering honesty of their opponents, for there is little else to guarantee that everyone is playing by the rules. I believe it is a better sport for it and there are sufficient examples of players reporting their own infraction of a rule and taking the resulting penalty to prove that they believe it as well.

In a world where television coverage and instant replay allow us to clearly see the baseball outfielder who proudly holds up his glove to show the fly ball he “caught” when he could not possibly have missed the fact that it bounced in front that glove, where basketball players seemed to be as well, or better, schooled in how to fall to the floor at the slightest touch in an attempt to draw a foul than they are in how to shoot a free throw, where the average football running play ends in a large pile of defenders all trying to steal the ball from the tackled runner, the notion of a sport that seeks to stay above that kind of behavior is encouraging.

We are short enough on discipline and honor in our society Tiger. What should be our great institutions of business and government are widely distrusted and it’s players seen as dishonest. Our colleges and universities are rife with scandals in how their athletic programs are run. Most professional sports long ago made it plain that it’s all about the money. Yes, golf is just a game but it still has a chance to show that it is possible for us to do when we try. That we can put our own immediate benefit aside and do what is right in all other contexts.  

You’ve had many ups and downs in your life since the time you were almost universally admired as a great athlete and a great man. You aree again benefitting the sport of golf greatly by your presence and seemingly begun to recover your former glory. Now is not the time to be tarnishing either the reputation of the sport or your own.

There will be more tournaments. More chances to win. You should have withdrawn.

So Mayor Bloomberg’s effort to tell New Yorkers what’s good for them has been struck down. Who did he think he was anyway trying to tell people that they can’t drink fizzy sugar-water by the gallon if they want to? Thank goodness the evil “nanny state” has been thwarted again in its attempt to control our lives. Yeah, right.

It’s not that I don’t understand some of the resistance displayed when government tries to nudge our behavior in some direction; especially when the target of the nudge is as seemingly arbitrary as this one. Why, indeed, should large sodas be banned as a wicked source of calories when no one is aiming at all the other easily purchased roads to obesity that are left open?

But is that what is happening here or is this simply the built-in reaction on the part of so many Americans to any attempt to tell them what to do; no matter how rational the directive? Or worse, is this backlash not based on principle but more on addiction to overindulgence?    

We have fought again and again against the voices of reason and self-preservation. When the first call for putting seatbelts in our cars was risen by safety advocates the reaction from manufacturers and drivers alike was tepid at best and many to this day refuse to protect themselves by using them regularly. The lives that have been saved by doings so, however, number in the tens of thousands since the nanny state required their presence and use.

When I was younger it seemed as though the majority of people I knew smoked. The nanny began to understand that doing so meant that an alarming number of those people would eventually suffer from disabling, or fatal, illness. It began the restriction on advertising of, and then campaign to convince Americans to quit voluntarily harming themselves with, cigarettes. Many said it was nobody’s business but their own whether they smoked or not. Many still do. But the intrusion would probably seem warranted to the estimated 800,000 Americans whose lives have been saved by its occurrence.

The sad fact is that for all our resistance to the nanny state’s well-founded advice we are perfectly willing to run back to a “mommy state” that we know will never forsake when our obstinate, poorly informed or foolishly chosen decisions have unfortunate consequences. At great cost to everyone, we take outsized advantage of the medical system to treat the results of our insistence on smoking or driving unbelted. We will apparently choose to do the same for the effects of obesity, which are only going to increase, if we do not accept reasonable steps to control it now.

This is surely no time to be inviting unwarranted intrusions in the private lives of Americans. Most of how we conduct our lives must still be for us alone to decide. The sheer number of us involved in any given activity or behavior, however, can mean that behavior can rapidly turn harmful to ourselves and others. For the good of us all we must be more willing to consider well-reasoned nudges toward a more positive future.

The long-expected call came.
She had left us early that morning,
passing peacefully from one sleep into another.

Entering the room where she lay
it was hard not to wonder if this mere empty shell
was the woman I had known so long.
Looking so much smaller now than ever before.
All the energy had gone out of it.
All the fight to go on was now abandoned.

I remembered the seemingly endless store of photographs
that were part of flotsam and jetsam
of the life she was leaving behind.
Hundreds and hundreds I had already spent hours sorting through.
Some familiar, some surprising.
So many photos displaying a young girl simply full of promise;
brimming over with song
and the joy of youthful dreams.
Blissfully unaware that those shots would be followed by
many more capturing the image of a mature woman –
proud of her family,
her position in her community,
and that these would all too soon be behind her.

But I knew too that she would have believed that she had not left life behind.
That she was now again that young girl,
or maybe that proud wife,
joyous in rejoining those she so loved who had gone before.
She would have said that the empty shell before us was just an abandoned chrysalis
left over from the new butterfly’s escape.

It’s been a long time since I believed in a heaven
and I would willingly argue its non-existence at another time.
But for now, for her sake, I would be more than happy
to be wrong.

Reaction to the nomination of former Senator Chuck Hegel to be Secretary of Defense has been much as expected. Members of both parties immediately chimed in expressing fear for the country’s safety should he be confirmed and allowed to bring some limits to Pentagon spending and, more worrying, pointing out as a major character flaw his questioning of our policies of total support of Israel.

Now Mr. Hegel may or may not be the best candidate for Secretary at this time, but the reaction his nomination has drawn should be the opportunity for us to get some resolution to the question of just how we will continue to deal with our “greatest ally” in the Middle East. It is time, certainly, for us to treat Israel as we would any other state. It is not defenseless. It is not always a victim. It is not always innocent. It does not always act as that greatest ally in the Middle East.

Even more importantly, we must decide just how much of a political sin it is to even dare questioning that country’s policies and actions and whether we can justly designate such speech being labeled anti-Semitic.

The state of Israel will eventually need to decide if it wants to be a part of the modern world of viable nations and behave accordingly or if it wishes to perpetually hide behind the image of a huddled mass of the helpless being persecuted every time it is challenged.

More importantly, however, we will need to decide if we are indeed a land of free speech or one that has more and more topics labeled as taboo socially and politically. The mere act of suggesting that Social Security parameters should be examined, for instance, has become cause for targeting lawmakers as the enemy by too many spoiled, don’t-like-to-face-the-truth-about-economics baby-boomers resulting in reforming the system being a virtual non-starter. Proposing any kind of gun-control legislation gets the same sort of response only from a more threatening portion of the population.

In the work-a-day corporate world, the likelihood of an employee reporting a truly incompetent coworker or, even worse, a directionless manager or supervisor to a superior are virtually nil because of the expectation of either being ignored or being labeled as a square peg in a world where round pegs get ahead. Fear of repercussions keeps employers from warning the next unfortunate firm about the incompetence of a job applicant recently ousted from their employ.

The more we willingly allow topics of social, economic, and political significance to be declared off-limits, the more we take the easy road and avoid facing reality, the more dysfunctional we become and the less it will matter if we have a First, Second or any other Amendment guarantee in our Constitution. That document was based on the expectation of its creators that we would never reach a point where we could not at least speak freely to each other in seeking solutions to our common dilemmas.