Can a Nation Be Like an Overly Protective Parent?

photo of Al-Assad Family from early l990’s

In a Foreign Affairs piece, “The Calm Before the Storm” (January, February 2015), Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Gregory F. Treverton make the following statement in response to the question of why Lebanon is fairing better than Syria these days: “Prior to its civil war, Syria was exhibiting only pseudo-stability, its calm façade concealing deep structural vulnerabilities. Lebanon’s chaos, paradoxically signaled strength. Fifteen years of civil war had served to decentralize the state and bring about a more balanced sectarian power-sharing structure.” Usually one generalizes from specific examples, but in this case an observation about a nation state might also be used to talk about a particularity, say an individual or family. Syria is like the individual who has had a seemingly secure upbringing. In fact, Bashar al-Assad is the son of an autocrat and he came to power by way of accession, after his older brother died in an accident. We might assume he had relatively little experience with turmoil. On the other side of the fence Lebanon has been a notoriously riven country with a long history of conflict between Christians and Muslims. It’s the home of the Hezbollah. In this regard Lebanon might be compared to the child who has grown in a turbulent environment, in a house in filled with arguing parents and problems of addiction or alcoholism. When the shit hits the fan who is going to fare better? The child or the country with no skills in dealing with adversity or the kid or nation who has had to face serious challenges? No one has truly answered these questions. Some children as well as grownups, who have fragile dispositions, merely crumble when the going gets tough. But the Lebanon/Syria paradigm that Taleb and Treverton point to is instructive both in terms of nation and personality building. One can’t help but feel that a wide palette of experience in handling ups and downs is the best preparation for both countries and individuals.

The Cars Come and Go Talking of Michelangelo

Will driving be akin to flying? Will you program your trajectory and contact the equivalent of air traffic control as you proceed to turn out of your driveway which will now be tantamount to a runway. In a recent Times piece (“Less Sexy, Better for Sex,” NYT, 7/5/14), Delia Ephron deals with the matter of Google’s “self-driving car” which was the subject of an interview with its inventor Sebastian Thrun,“Google’s Original X-Man,”  (Foreign Affairs, November/December 2013) ). In the Foreign Affairs piece Thrun comments,  “If you look at the twentieth century the car has transformed society more than pretty much any other invention. But cars today are vastly unsafe. It’s estimated that more than a million people die every year because of traffic accidents. And driving cars consumes immense amounts of time…if the car could drive itself, you could be much safer…cars could come to you when you need them; you wouldn’t have to have private car ownership.” But the issue is not only a matter of safety, it has to do with integrity. As Ephron points out the car is a symbol of autonomy, “In American middle-class life driving is independence. Remember your learner’s permit and that first venture out: you in the driver’s seat, Mom or Dad coaching? With the Google car, say goodbye to all that bonding as well as the psychological growth that the switch-around embodies.” However, independence as Ephron points out is also a matter of mastery and privacy. If Google does everything you no longer have to know how to drive, just like today no one really has to have the ability to write by hand or calculate since the computer will do it all for you. And yes if we look like our Interstate system as a gigantic airport, traffic flow will definitely be improved by the advent of a traffic controller and will you now simply be a cog in the wheel of Big Data. Ephron asks if Google can “eavesdrop on your car talk?” or “run you into a wall or over a cliff?" But it’s not just Google. Anyone who owns and Easy Pass has to realize that they’ve taken the first step in logging into the system.

The Driverless Car

photo: Steve  Jurvelson

In an interview in Foreign Affairs, Google’s Sebastian Thrun talks about driverless cars, (“Google’s Original X Man,” November/December 2013)  “If you look at the twentieth century Thrun says, “the car has transformed society more than pretty much any other invention. But cars today are vastly unsafe. It’s estimated that more than a million people die every years because of traffic accidents. And driving cars consumes immense amounts of time…if the car could drive itself, you could be much safer…cars could come to you when you need them; you wouldn’t have to have private car ownership.” Of course the car is like Manifest Destiny. It’s the symbol both of individualization and of the American dream. One’s first car is a rite of passage. The concept of the driverless car is a quid pro quo in which individuality is traded in for expediency. Highways are turned into the equivalent of tarmacs with cars transformed into pods whose movement is dictated by the equivalent of air traffic control. Traffic jams are non-existent since the thermodynamics of viscosity would constantly be mediated by a computer. Of course, along with individuality, privacy would also be sacrificed, since each car or pod would now be a piece of data whose movements were constantly tracked.The driverless car is a concept in robotics. And the real subject is the kind of advanced artificial intelligence that can produce a robot which not only regurgitates the data that’s programmed into it, but which, according to Thrun, can also learn. But the implications are vast. Computers have already proven their superiority to men in everything from math to chess. And when a computer takes on a task and proves its superiority, it leads to the attrition of the concomitant faculty in the human, whether it's long division or writing or even reading. However, what happens when cybernetics intrudes into even higher level thought? What’s the difference between governing a country and driving a  car? The computer will have the cards stacked in its favor. It will know how to push everyone’s buttons since it installed at least the technologically created ones. And what about the integrity of the self in this mix? Human life might be spared by the driverless car, but what ultimately is the destiny of the solitary mind in a world in which the objects of man’s creation rule him by way of a world wide web.

Beyond An Unreasonable Doubt

In a review of Joshua Greene’s Moral Tribes: Emotion, Reason and the Gap Between Us and Them in The Atlantic (“Why We Fight—And Can We Stop,” November 2013) Robert Wright deals a unique approach to the Trolley Problem. The famous conundrum posed by the ethical philosopher Philippa Foot deals with the decision to sacrifice one life in order to save many by diverting a runaway trolley. “Greene’s inspiration was to do brain scans of people while they thought about the trolley problem,” Wright says. “The results suggested that people who refused to save five lives by pushing an innocent bystander to his death were swayed by emotional parts of their brains, whereas people who chose the more utilitarian solution—keep as many people alive as possible—showed more activity in parts of the brain associated with logical thought.” In an article in Foreign Affairs (“Never Saw It Coming: Why the Financial Crisis Took Economists By Surprise,” November/December 2013)former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan introduces a similar idea in an economic rather than moral context. Citing “’animal spirits,’ the term Keynes famously coined in l936 to refer to 'a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction,’" Greenspan argues that no understanding of “Homo economicus” can be had unless one understands the irrational emotion underlying seemingly rational choices. “From the perspective of a forecaster, the issue is not whether behavior is rational but whether it is sufficiently repetitive and systematic to be numerically measured and predicted,” he says. "The challenge is to better understand what Daniel Kahneman, a leading behavioral economist, refers to as ‘fast thinking' : the quick reaction judgments on which people tend to base much, if not all, of their day-to-day decisions about financial markets. No one is immune to the emotions of fear and euphoria, which are among the predominant drivers of speculative markets. But people respond to fear and euphoria in different ways, and those responses  create specific, observable patterns of thought and behavior.” So what Wright and Greenspun are doing is in essence placing thought itself under scrutiny. The Iowa Gambling Task, devised by the neuroscientists Antonio Damasio, Antoine Bechara, Steven Anderson and Daniel Tranel, which uses card games and skin respiration tests, to measure the presence of emotions as complex as Schadenfreude is another iteration of a similar idea. Reason, like Newtonian physics in a world of relativity, is again left in the dust.

The Digital Faust

Burgess Meredith in “Time Enough to Last"

In an article in Foreign Affairs (“The Rise of Big Data, May/June 2013), Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schoenberger make the following comment, “In the third century B.C. the Library of Alexandria was believed to house the sum of human knowledge. Today, there is enough information in the world to give every person alive 320 times as much of it as historians think was stored in Alexandria’s entire collection—an estimated 1200 exabytes’ worth, If this information were placed on CD’s and they were stacked up, the CD’s would form five separate piles that would all reach to the moon.” There is a famous Twilight Zone, “Time Enough to Last," where Burgess Meredith plays the role of a man who just wants to be left alone with all his books. He gets his wish. The problem is that he is nearly blind and as he is about to sate his desire, his glasses crack. Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger describe the advent of a condition which is a little like the effect global warming has had on weather and the environment. Shrinkage of polar ice caps have unleashed huge amounts of water which affect sea levels and inevitably in a kind of domino effect air and water currents (like El Nino), ultimately resulting in many of the explosive, tornadoes, tsunamis and severe tropical storms from Katrina to the recent debacle created by Sandy. In a short period of time the information explosion created primarily by digitalization, the internet and most importantly by what Cukier and Mayer-Schoenberger term “datafication,” (in their words “a far broader activity: taking all aspects of life and turning them into data. Google’s augmented reality-glasses datafy the gaze. Twitter datafies stray thoughts. LinkedIn datafies professional networks.”) has reached tsunami levels. It’s as if we are drowning in information, with only soothsayers aka search engines like Google, who themselves are driven by mysterious algorithmic forces that few really understand, providing a beam of light. It’s Faust all over again. Mankind has sold its soul in his quest for ultimate knowledge. Will the price for the striving be a form of ignorance in which the brain, like old car radiators, boils over and finally quits? It’s a theme that Jorge Luis Borges developed in his famous story "The Library of Babel." You can know a lot about a little or a little about a lot. But it’s virtually impossible to know a lot about a lot.