L.M. Sacacas, Render Unto the Machine:

My present thesis is something like this: The claim or fear that AI will displace human beings becomes plausible to the degree that we have already been complicit in a deep deskilling that has unfolded over the last few generations. Or, to put it another way, it is easier to imagine that we are replaceable when we have already outsourced many of our core human competencies.

Put somewhat differently, the message of the medium we are presently calling AI is the realization that modern institutions and technologies have been schooling people toward their own future obsolescence.

Indeed, we might go further and say that the triumph of modern institutions is that they have schooled us even to desire our own obsolescence. If a job, a task, a role, or an activity becomes so thoroughly mechanical or bureaucratic, for the sake of efficiency and scale, say, that it is stripped of all human initiative, thought, judgment, and, consequently, responsibility, then of course, of course we will welcome and celebrate its automation. If we have been schooled to think that we lack basic levels of latent competence and capability, or that the cultivation of such competencies and capabilities entails too much inconvenience or risk or uncertainty, then of course, of course we will welcome and celebrate the displacement of our labor, involvement, and care.

Michael continues:

I recently spent a couple of hours navigating the labyrinth of a certain credit card’s customer service machinery. This is a banal and familiar experience. I won’t trouble you with the details. As I was passed from an automated service to one department and then another and back again, ad nauseam, I realized that there were three kinds of agents I encountered. Of course, there was the obvious distinction between the automated service and persons, but it occurred to me that there was one further distinction to be made.

When I finally encountered a person who assumed a measure of care and responsibility for my situation, the whole quality of my experience changed. The tenor of the interaction was wholly different and the sense of being trapped in an endless loop of futility faded. Here, finally, was a person in the fullest sense dealing with me, in turn, as a person and not merely a problem framed by an elaborate bureaucratic playbook.

What I mean by this, and I want to be careful how I put this, is not that the handful of people I had spoken to beforehand, regardless of how they dealt with me, were not persons with full moral standing. I only mean that their speech and actions were machine-like in quality. So then, it seemed to me that there were not two but three possibilities in navigating this system: encountering a machine, encountering a person whose actions conform to the machine, and, finally, encountering a person who somehow managed to resist such conformity.

The truth, of course, is that the principles of efficiency and speed and optimization and profitability, recurring themes here of late, increasingly dictate how we act and interact in many if not most of the social spaces we inhabit. Thoughtless automaticity, which demoralizes all parties, becomes our default mode, whether our thoughtless automaticity takes the form of resigned indifference or utterly predictable outrage and indignation.

So much so that it can be startling, if also invigorating and life-giving, to encounter someone who will break the script and deal with you as a person in fullest sense—by taking the time to regard you with kindness and respect, by offering a simple gesture of help or courtesy born out of deliberate attentiveness, by conveying care through the words they speak to us and how they are delivered. In other words, simply to be acknowledged as a person by a person can be a revitalizing gift, and most of us are, to some degree, in a position to grant it gratuitously. And we should. It may be the most vital practice, or perhaps better, discipline that we can cultivate. The effect is at times not unlike the moment in our stories when someone on the brink of death is given a magic, life-saving potion that instantly revives them … but for the soul. And in this case, the healing property enlivens both the recipient and the one who administers the elixir.

I had a similar experience with our health insurance company last week.  It had been lousy day for multiple reasons, a perceived insurance coverage issue being one them.  Finally getting through to a human who listened, looked into the issue, and explained what was going on changed my whole outlook.  It made all the difference in the world to be talking with someone who gave a damn.  It probably wasn’t in her job description that she had to, but she did.  I thanked her profusely.  (And, much to my relief, there wasn’t an issue with our coverage!  The Explanation of Benefits letter I’d received just hadn’t been clear in spots and it had confused me.)

Ian Buruma, Doing the Work:  The Protestant ethic and the spirit of wokeness:

Understanding wokeness as an essentially Protestant phenomenon helps us to recognize the logic behind some of the rituals that have become customary in recent years: specifically, the public apology. One element that distinguishes the Protestant tradition from the other Abrahamic religions is its emphasis on public avowal. Catholics confess to priests in private and are absolved of their sins, until it is time to confess once more. Many Protestants are encouraged to affirm their virtue by making public confessions of faith.

Johann Neem, Missed America:  Attacking the right without asking about the left:

[Professional historians] have a public trust to uphold, one that has become even more important as the US Supreme Court draws on “history and tradition” to interpret the Constitution. Can we be relied upon to offer honest appraisals of gun laws, abortion access and regulation, public health, and other important questions facing our country? … I’m not saying that historians should not have politics. We can’t help but have them… When historians are willing to celebrate narratives that simplify and distort so long as they support “our” side, what is one to conclude about professional historians? And if we treat all competing narratives as myths and lies, then who will listen to us when we call out actual lies, such as claims about stolen elections?

Pat Garafalo, The Secret to the Democrats’ Future Lies in Western Pennsylvania:

In Congress, [Rep. Chris] DeLuzio has continued to focus on corporate greed. Following the East Palestine, Ohio, train derailment, which occurred just a mile away from his district, for example, he introduced multiple pieces of railroad safety legislation… Synergy between different levels of government is a key aspect of this emerging model, so it wasn’t surprising to see Pennsylvania House Democrats pushing the same goals. State Representative Rob Matzie, another Western Pennsylvania legislator, ushered through a bill establishing new requirements for railroads operating in the state. Another statehouse member from the area, Representative Nick Pisciottano, has also made challenging corporate power a legislative centerpiece. He’s introduced groundbreaking price-fixing legislation, co-sponsored a major antitrust reform bill, and is shepherding a bill through taking on so-called “junk fees,” the ubiquitous charges that corporations from Ticketmaster to rental car companies to hotels throw on your bills simply because they can. This is an issue so potentially electorally potent that it merited a mention from Biden in the State of the Union, and Pisciottano’s bill is the most comprehensive of a suite of similar legislation across the country…

In the same vein, Representative Sara Innamorato—another Western Pennsylvania official who recently won the Democratic nomination to be Allegheny County Executive—is working to rein in so-called TRAPS, abusive employee debt agreements which force workers to repay often hefty training costs before leaving for a new job. Her legislative work has also focused on reining in corporate power, whether through repealing tax subsidies, reforming antitrust and merger law, or ensuring people can access the resources fix their own homes, instead of selling them off to developers. That theme carried through to her county-level race, where she proved a whole lot of naysayers wrong and shook off a late barrage of attack ads to win, convincingly.

What these perhaps disparate policy fights all have in common is they are connected to the real economy that people see and feel in the jobs they work, the bills they pay, the stores they shop in, the events they want to attend. Focusing on such tangible matters builds trust and appeals across the political spectrum on issues where Democrats tend to trail Republicans, generally (if unfairly): Who is more focused on the economy, who is more likely to create jobs, and who will do the most to bolster local businesses.

Ending on a Positive Note

The field that I worked in as a grad student has evolved in very exciting ways over the past thirty years!  It cracks me up that while there was no market for my specific expertise when I graduated, there’s considerable demand for it now.  (Suffice it to say that I’m a little rusty, but I would love to get back into it.)  From the American Physical Society, Atom and Molecule for Quantum “Blockade”:

To perform quantum computations using the quantum states of atoms, those states need to be entangled, making them interdependent. One way to do that uses an effect called the Rydberg blockade, whereby two atoms are coupled such that only one of them can be in a highly excited (“Rydberg”) state at any moment. Such coupling has now been demonstrated for the pairing of an atom with a molecule [1], a system that offers advantages over using atoms alone. The result opens the way to implementing quantum logic gates using such atom–molecule pairs and to fundamental investigations involving the precision control and measurement of the quantum states of molecules.