Noise

There are two basic ways to go mad. One is historical and the other, existential. Your personality may be festering one or more maladies of a psychological or neurological nature which eventually produce madness. Addiction can always help.  Essentially, a wet brain is an alcoholic who had been driven mad by drink. Most existential madness results from torture, used as an expedient to get information out of political captives. But a small slice of the madness pie can be accounted for by jackhammering, what in New York parlance is called “opening up the street.” Steam and sewage pipes are always bursting and there is nothing to do, but go down under to dig up the mess and if the problem is serious enough, as in the case of a major water main break, the going down under can go on for days, weeks, even months, with the result that those living in the near vicinity of these excavations pay the price. Noise pollution is the polite term. It’s like termination with extreme prejudice or extraordinary rendition, euphemisms that covers over the murder that is taking place. If "Macbeth does murder sleep,” such projects take eliminate any vestiges of peace in the urban jungle with its sirens, honking cabs and insistent car alarms that go off in the middle of the night. If silence is golden, then in Manhattan the experience of silence is the equivalent of the gold rush of ’49 to those who crave relief from the pounding that’s driving many of them nuts. Tinnitus is a condition where one hears ringing in the ears. The sound of the streets constantly being opened up is outside the ear, but it leaves its mark on not only he eardrum but the neurogenic pathways that monitor auditory sensation in the brain, many of whose dendrites and axons  get rubbed raw. “It was like getting a note saying you’ll be executed at dawn,” The Times quoted a sufferer by the name of Roberto Gautier, a Brooklyn Heights resident, after he was informed “that nightly construction was likely to continue until 2014” (“Behind City’s Painful Din, Culprits High and Low,” NYT, 7/12/13).

Drone On

photo: Sheika04 at en.wikipedia

In a Times Op-Ed piece entitled “Smart Drones,” (NYT, 3/16/17) Bill Keller remarks “ Imagine that the decision to kill a suspected enemy is not made by an operator in a distant control room, but by the machine itself. Imagine that an aerial robot studies the landscape below, recognizes hostile activity, calculates that there is minimal risk of collateral damage, and then, with no human in the loop, pulls the trigger.” What if the objects of man’s own creation, develop a life of their own and eventually overpower him? Could you envision a smart gun that came to a verdict about its owner’s character and pulled the trigger? What if the computer typing these words decides that the audience who will read them is not ready and proceeds to edit the passage independently?What if it decides it has a better way of doing things than the ones you might have chosen? As farfetched as this seems we have numerous examples of computers not letting us or do this or that function in everyday life. We treat these computers or software programs with a great deal of tolerance like a parent a child in the throes of his or her terrible two’s, but we are in denial about the fact that some cybernetic protocols exist in a morally ambiguous universe and one that is not directly the product of human consciousness. Certain programs simply will not be stopped once they are started, as we have seen in the case of the stock market where complex algorithms have undone their hosts. But returning to the subject of drones. No one likes to be the executioner. It’s easier to have a machine do the job. Words and phrases in fact are created as euphemisms for torture or murder. “Extraordinary rendition” is one. “Termination with extreme prejudice" is another. Imagine that you still have a death penalty for murder, but the electric chair, gas chamber or lethal injection is no longer given by a person and the witnesses too are all robots. That would indeed be a crime.