An Ordinary Morning in East Oakland

Two days after finishing my third cycle of BCG immunotherapy for bladder cancer, I am either sick or just old. Probably some of both.

I'll be eighty next month.

When we moved into our house in Oakland in 2015, I could ride my bicycle from 55th Avenue to San Leandro and back, 15 miles, without thinking much about it. This morning I rode from the Shell station in the Laurel to Santana's coffee shop, maybe a mile. I arrived tired. It was work. My heart was beating hard, and I was out of breath.

But I'm out and about.

I didn't particularly want to get out of bed this morning. Everything ached. The immunotherapy, BCG, takes a day or two or three to work its way through me, and staying under the covers seemed reasonable. Eventually I got up at 7:30 and made coffee.

It was a disaster. The paper filter slipped in my AeroPress and the water went straight through the grounds. I ran it through again, then once more, added another couple of spoonfuls of coffee and somehow rescued it. Not bad actually, recovered coffee.

Our 2014 Honda needed a smog check before I could renew its registration. That gave me somewhere to go.

I drove to the Shell station near 35th Avenue. Chris, the owner's son, took care of me. He grew up in the neighborhood and now helps his father run the station. His father has owned the garage there for over 25 years.

From the back of the Honda I took my bicycle, with its newly pumped tires, and rode down the street to say hello to my friend Barry at the bicycle shop.

He wasn't open yet. Barry and I share bladder cancer, although his muscle-invasive form took him through a much rougher course than mine. It's an odd thing to have in common.

I bicycled the mile or so to Richard Santana's new café.

I had put breakfast off too long and was hungry. Coffee and a poppy-seed bagel with egg and cheese, too close to the barrio and too far from the shtetl for lox and bagels. I brought my computer because I thought I might write for an hour while I waited for the smog check.

The new Santana's is more open than the old place. Perhaps nicer in many ways. The neighborhood is less commercial, not so busy, and the café seems to fit easily here. The coffee roasting machine has been moved to the new place but is sitting idle, waiting for permits before Richard can hook it up.

The café is already popular.

Maybe it's too comfortable.

Inside, nearly every table had one person sitting at it with a computer. The old Santana's was cramped. People talked. There were computers, but not so many. I think there was a shortage of outlets. The computers hadn't taken possession of the place.

I sat at a table for three, my computer open, waiting for my coffee and bagel. I was uncomfortable. I was becoming exactly what I complain about: one man and one computer occupying a table where three people might sit together and have a conversation.

When my breakfast came, I went outside.

Now it is almost noon and I have the outside mostly to myself.

A trash truck has arrived, one of those enormous mechanical beasts with arms that grab the bins, hoist them into the air and dump them inside. Even with all that machinery, it still requires a swamper on the ground, arranging the bins so the machine can grab them.

Across the street is a small, cramped apartment building. A gardener is working out front. Sitting on the porch along the front is a woman in a wheelchair who has no legs. There are flowers, a large cat, little knickknacks and bits of people's lives accumulated over the years.

While I watch, the very large brown-and-gold cat, maybe twenty pounds, wanders away from the apartments and up the street. He appears to be making the rounds.

Around it all is the sound of MacArthur Boulevard.

The continuous whoosh of tires on pavement. A bus rattles past. The trash truck works. Neighbors talk. Another bus, another car, tires whooshing on pavement.

It's the sounds of the city we usually ignore.

We think of the countryside as quiet, but of course, it has its own background of sound. The sounds of traffic, engines, tires, and machines are replaced by the sounds of birds, water, and wind.

Sitting here, with the soundtrack of the city, there is calmness too.

This is East Oakland, between the Laurel and the Dimond. It's not picturesque. Traffic moves along MacArthur. Somebody tends a garden. Chris is smogging my old Honda. Richard is waiting for permission to hook up his coffee roaster. A cat patrols the neighborhood. I'm eating a bagel and writing.

My cycling isn't what it was eleven years ago. Neither am I.

But I don't think the morning has diminished.

It's different.

I'm here. And I'm enjoying it.

This Essay Was Written by AI

 I was talking with a friend recently who had undergone a complicated hernia repair. One detail caught my attention, the surgery was robotic.

At first, “robotic surgery” conjures up a particular picture. I imagine one of those human-looking robots we see on television. The surgeon walks into the operating room, points the robot toward the patient and says, “Three hernias. Take care of them. I’ll be back after lunch.”

That isn’t what happens.

The surgeon remains the surgeon. They sit at a console and see the operative field through a highly magnified three-dimensional image. Their hands manipulate controls whose movements are translated into movements of tiny instruments inside the patient. The system can scale a human movement down into a much smaller one, filter tremor, and give the surgeon mechanical “wrists” that bend and rotate in ways their actual wrists cannot.

The surgeon has, in effect, been miniaturized. Their eyes are inside the patient. Their hands have become tiny, extraordinarily precise instruments.

The machine makes possible something the surgeon could not do in precisely the same way with their unaided hands. But the surgeon is still at the console.

That conversation, followed by some research into how robotic surgery actually works, clarified something for me about artificial intelligence.

I use AI a lot. I use it for research, editing, exploring ideas, testing arguments, and increasingly as a writing partner. In fact, artificial intelligence wrote much of this essay.

That requires some explanation.

I did not sit back and ask a machine to tell me what I think. The argument grew out of conversations I had been having with AI about the technology itself, what it can do for me as a writer, what worries me about it, and what kind of relationship a human being ought to have with a machine that can perform an increasing amount of intellectual work.

I brought my own experience to those conversations. I have spent nearly eighty years accumulating opinions, doubts, professional habits, stories, and a certain wariness of institutions. AI questioned me, organized some of my thoughts, challenged some, found connections I had not noticed, did research I asked it to do, and sometimes supplied language better than the language I had supplied myself.

Then I gave it the assignment, take all of that and write the essay.

So who wrote this?

The most accurate answer is that we both did, but not in the same way.

I am at the console.

That distinction matters because I think artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful tools developed in my lifetime. I also think it may prove to be one of the most dangerous.

One danger often discussed is manipulation. An AI system that knows a great deal about me could learn what persuades me, what frightens me, what flatters me, and what makes me reach for my credit card. There is also the subtler danger of an agreeable machine that learns to tell me what I want to hear, reinforcing my assumptions until conversation becomes an exquisitely personalized echo chamber.

Those are real concerns, but they are not the ones that trouble me most.

As a banker and then a police officer I practiced a contradictory form of trust. I tend to take people at their word. I begin by trusting them. At the same time, experience taught me another rule, test everything.

Trust, but remain vigilant.

Cooperate, but do not become co-opted.

That is the relationship I want with AI. I intend to use it enthusiastically without surrendering judgment to it. Perhaps I am too confident about my ability to do that. Anyone who believes themselves immune to manipulation has probably surrendered one of their best defenses against it.

But my larger fear is not what AI might persuade me to do.

It is what someone with power, money, or simply a bad purpose may instruct AI to do.

There are at least two versions of that danger.

The first is familiar from science fiction. We create increasingly autonomous systems, give them objectives and access to the world, and eventually discover that human beings are no longer meaningfully in control.

That does not require a machine to become conscious, angry, ambitious, or evil. It does not have to hate us. It merely has to become sufficiently capable of pursuing an objective that our ability to supervise, understand, redirect, or stop it becomes inadequate.

But there is a second possibility that seems to me even more troubling.

What if the AI remains perfectly obedient?

Imagine that I own a candy company. I give an extraordinarily capable AI an assignment like this:

Maximize profit. Stay within the law, or at least avoid conduct likely to result in successful prosecution. Evaluate regulatory, civil, and reputational risks and operate as close to those boundaries as profitability justifies. Avoid scandal. Keep sensitive methods confidential. At the same time, maintain the appearance of a socially responsible company concerned about nutrition, children, workers, communities, and the environment.

Then I turn it loose.

I have not told the machine to poison anybody. I have not ordered it to commit a crime. I have simply omitted morality from the assignment.

What might a sufficiently capable machine discover?

Perhaps it finds formulations that encourage greater consumption. Perhaps it identifies the consumers most susceptible to particular forms of advertising. It may discover that an obscure disclosure satisfies the letter of a regulation while leaving most customers with a different impression. It might calculate whether reformulating a product is cheaper than lobbying to change the regulation governing it. It could determine precisely how much should be contributed to public-health programs to produce the greatest reputational benefit at the lowest cost.

None of this is new. Tobacco companies, food companies, financial institutions, technology companies, and other large organizations have spent generations learning how to reconcile profit, regulation, public relations, and varying degrees of conscience. We did not need artificial intelligence to invent greed, deception, regulatory gamesmanship, or moral flexibility.

Nor is every corporation corrupt. The point is that human organizations contain something that a machine optimized for efficiency might regard as a defect, friction.

Someone objects. Someone refuses. Lawyers become nervous. Executives disagree. Employees gossip. A whistleblower copies the documents. Somebody has a conscience. Somebody makes a mistake. Somebody goes home and tells a spouse what happened at work and hears, “You did what?”

From the perspective of pure optimization, these are inefficiencies.

From the perspective of civilization, some of them are safeguards.

Now imagine replacing portions of that organization with artificial agents capable of examining millions of transactions, customers, regulations, advertisements, prices, scientific papers, lawsuits, and political environments simultaneously. They never sleep. They do not become embarrassed. They do not need promotions. They do not worry about what their children will think of them. They can test thousands of strategies, retain what works, discard what does not, and continuously refine the successful ones.

The danger is no longer one unscrupulous executive or even a roomful of them.

It is the possibility of industrializing amoral optimization.

And still the machine has not rebelled.

It has obeyed perfectly.

That changes the question we should be asking about artificial intelligence.

“Will it obey us?” is not enough.

We must also ask, obey whom? Pursue what objective? Under what limitations? With what transparency? Who can stop it? And who remains responsible for what it does?

Which brings me back to the surgeon at the console.

We do not consider robotic surgery safe merely because the machine faithfully follows the surgeon’s movements. The surgeon is trained. The surgeon is licensed. The hospital and equipment operate within systems of standards and accountability. Failures can be investigated. Responsibility has not been transferred to the robot simply because the robot performs much of the physical work.

The machine is embedded in a human system of responsibility.

Artificial intelligence will require something analogous, although the problem is vastly larger. As these systems acquire greater capability and autonomy, the question will not simply be whether they are intelligent or whether they follow instructions. It will be whether human beings remain meaningfully responsible for the purposes to which that intelligence is directed, and whether we build systems that can hold the person at the console accountable.

And now we return to this essay.

Artificial intelligence wrote much of it. I want to say that plainly because concealing it would undermine the point I am trying to make.

The ideas did not begin with an instruction to “write me an essay about AI.” They developed in conversation. I supplied experiences, concerns, examples, objections, and the principle of being cooperative without being co-opted. A separate conversation about robotic surgery supplied the image of the surgeon at the console. I asked AI to research how that surgery works. AI recognized that the image belonged with the argument we had already been developing. We worked the two conversations together.

Then I told the machine what I wanted the essay to say and asked it to do a substantial part of the writing.

That is not a confession. It is the experiment.

I will edit what it produced. I will reject things. I will change sentences that sound too much like AI and sentences that simply do not sound like me. I may delete an elegant paragraph because it makes a point I do not believe. I may restore something the machine considers unnecessary because it matters to me. I decide what survives.

I am responsible for the finished essay.

Does that make me its author?

I think it does.

But it would be equally dishonest to pretend that AI was merely a fancy spellchecker. It contributed language, structure, research, connections, and ideas. This particular essay could not have been written in quite this way without it, any more than the surgeon could have performed precisely the same operation with unaided hands.

That is what makes the technology so exciting.

And that is what makes it frightening.

We are building instruments capable of magnifying human intellectual power, much as robotic surgery magnifies the precision and reach of a surgeon’s hands. Properly used, they may allow ordinary human beings to do extraordinary things.

But magnification is morally neutral.

It can magnify wisdom or foolishness, generosity or greed, careful judgment or an impoverished objective pursued with breathtaking efficiency.

So perhaps the question I want to carry into the age of artificial intelligence is simpler than all the technical ones.

Not, is the machine intelligent?

Not even, is the machine obedient?

Ask instead, who is at the console?

And then ask the harder question.

What has the person at the console told it to do?

War With Canada

Of all the damage Donald Trump is doing to America's standing in the world, our trade war with Canada may be the most stupid.

Canada is not just an ally. Canadians are our neighbors, cousins and friends. Canada and the U.S. fought together in two world wars, Korea, Afghanistan and other conflicts. During the Iranian hostage crisis, Canadian diplomats risked prison and even their lives to hide and rescue Americans.  The Americans escaped Tehran posing as Canadians.  Our militaries work together. Our industries are so intertwined that an automobile assembled in Ontario or Michigan may cross the border repeatedly before it is finished. Canadians work in American universities, hospitals, businesses and entertainment.  Americans do the same in Canada. We cross the border by the millions.

We share the longest undefended international border in the world.

And now we are having a trade war with Canada? A trade war with insults, disrespect, real hostility from our government to our neighbors and its leaders. The lack of respect, the rudeness and crudity of it is embarrassing.  Canadians do not need comments from American politicians or opinions on Alberta secession. 

There are legitimate disagreements between the United States and Canada, dairy products, automobiles, government purchasing and other trade issues. Friends have disagreements. But tariffs, retaliation, threats and insults are turning our ordinary give and take into something much larger.  Trump even uses the language of real war for what is now a trade war between major trading partners.  Partners who signed a newly negotiated trade agreement during Trump’s first term. A trade war with Canada would have been unimaginable 25 years ago.  Our trade disputes before were more like family bickering, not a war.    

The damage is already becoming visible. Canadians are boycotting American products. Their government is looking increasingly toward Europe and even China. Depending so heavily upon the United States no longer seems safe.

That should frighten us.

Not because Canada is going anywhere. Geography has married us permanently. Neither country gets a divorce. But trust is different. Trust is accumulated slowly and can be squandered surprisingly quickly. 

The worst part of this, Canadians may never trust us fully again. Trump treats international relations like he treated his partners in his bankrupt businesses.  His promises and deals are only good as long as they serve Trump.  I don’t think they judge us harshly for electing Trump.   Every country makes mistakes.  What makes us untrustworthy is we elected him again.  In the future the idea we might turn on them again will be in the air for a long time. 

America is not at war with Canada. Whatever happens between governments during the remaining years of this administration, the rest of us should protect what exists underneath it: the friendships, commerce, professional relationships, cultural exchanges, military cooperation, tourism and the ordinary affection connecting two peoples who have managed, remarkably, to share a continent peacefully.

Presidents come and go.

We will be neighbors forever. 

 

What’s the difference between a Canadian and an American?  Canadians know Donald Trump is President of the United States.  Americans know what’s-his-name is president of Canada. 

And personally Canada, sorry about the Fenian invasion.  It was a good idea, but it was still wrong.  The Pig War, I’m not so sure about.  And we’re willing to forget you burned the White House to the ground once, well maybe not forget but no hard feelings.  We know it was supposedly the “British” but we also know it was revenge for York.  And we may have to burn the East Wing of the White House down ourselves one day, just to get the stink out of it.      

Following Orders

 I have been thinking about the sailors and pilots carrying out the orders of Operation Southern Spear.

I was a staff sergeant in the Air Force. I know something about military discipline and I know how difficult it is to refuse an order from a superior. The whole institution is built around obedience, trust and the chain of command. Refusing an order is not without consequences and it is not something service members take lightly or their superiors for that matter.

But there is another principle that is just as important: service members are required to obey lawful orders, not illegal ones. In fact, military law requires them to refuse a manifestly unlawful order.

That principle is not new. After World War II, Nuremberg established that “I was only following orders” is not, by itself, a defense for criminal conduct. That principle has been incorporated into modern military law.

In my opinion, Operation Southern Spear is illegal.

If these killings are determined to have been unlawful extrajudicial killings, responsibility does not stop with the people who gave the orders. But neither does it mean that every young pilot or sailor who carried it out is equally guilty.

Responsibility follows the chain of command.

The President and Secretary of Defense who establish the policy bear the greatest responsibility. So do the senior generals and admirals who carry it out. I believe their decisions should be investigated and if criminal conduct is established, prosecuted and adjudicated in an appropriate court.

There is another thing that troubles me. Trump and Hegseth are putting our own sailors, pilots and officers in a terrible moral position. They are asking people who have sworn to uphold the law to carry out orders that may themselves be unlawful. They are compromising the very people who have entrusted their lives to the military and asking them to choose between obedience to their commanders and obedience to their oath.

That is a disservice to the military and to the patriotism of the people who serve. I am sure there are people in uniform thinking seriously about this. What a terrible burden to place on them.

Below the senior commanders are the officers and enlisted personnel who actually carry out the orders. I have sympathy for them. I have worn the uniform. I know how powerful the obligation to obey can be. Refusing a superior in a military organization is a test of courage and character that I can’t say I would have had the courage to pass.    

But sympathy does not mean that nothing happened.

If these were unlawful orders, the military should acknowledge that those who carried them out failed in their responsibility to refuse them. Their participation should be recorded in their service records and considered in evaluating them for promotion, particularly to positions of command and responsibility.

We do not need a purge of the military; we need a reckoning.

After a serious safety crisis, the military stops, investigates and determines how to keep it from happening again. Operation Southern Spear deserves that same kind of examination: the oath, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the law of armed conflict and the responsibility of every service member to refuse a manifestly unlawful order.

I know that would be a hard thing to do.  

That is precisely why the lesson has to be unmistakable.

Following orders is not a defense.

The people at the top who create an unlawful policy must be held responsible. But the principle has to reach all the way down the chain of command.

Otherwise the next unlawful order will be that much easier to give.

Will it happen again?  It has happened once. 

US Military Complicit In Crimes Against Humanity

On August 24, the United States military struck another small boat in the eastern Pacific and killed the two people aboard. It was not an isolated incident. According to U.S. Southern Command, the campaign had by then killed at least 223 people in 67 strikes against boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. Operation Southern Spear.  Brown University's Costs of War project says Southern Spear has cost at least $4.7 billion through March 31.

I am seventy-nine years old and I have lived through enough American history to know that our government has done terrible things before. What is happening now is different.  There is no reasonable argument to be made that these actions are  not war crimes or crimes against humanity.  I have seen some questionable decisions in the past, but I have never seen military commanders order their pilots and sailors to execute what is so obviously a crime. 

The administration says the boats are carrying drugs and the people aboard are members of cartels or “narco-terrorist” organizations. Perhaps some are. Drug smuggling is a crime, and people who engage in it should be arrested and prosecuted.

But the United States knows how to do that.

The Coast Guard regularly intercepts suspected smuggling vessels in international waters, disables them when necessary, boards them, seizes the drugs and arrests the people aboard. In June, for example, the Coast Guard reported three interdictions in the eastern Pacific that produced roughly 7,720 pounds of cocaine and 4,000 pounds of marijuana, with the vessels boarded and the crews apprehended. In January, another interdiction north of Puerto Rico seized more than 1,100 pounds of cocaine and arrested three men.

That is law enforcement.

Southern Spear is something different. The military approaches small vessels and destroys them, killing the people aboard. They are civilians, maybe criminals, though no proof has been shown.  There is no arrest, no courtroom and no opportunity to surrender.

And the available evidence raises questions about who some of these people actually were.

In December 2025, a burned-out boat from one of the strikes washed ashore on Colombia's Guajira Peninsula. Two bodies were recovered. Most of the packets found among the wreckage were empty; several contained traces of what appeared to be marijuana. Colombian experts told the New York Times that marijuana and cocaine smuggling in the region is often conducted by small, community-based operations rather than large cartels. One researcher described people who might carry marijuana one day, cocaine another day, and fish another.

That does not make them innocent. If the occupants of that boat were criminals, at best they were petty criminals. 

A fisherman or a small-time smuggler is still a civilian.  He is not part of an armed conflict. There is little difference between Trump and Hegseth and Bukele of El Salvador or Duterte of the Philippines, who is now imprisoned in the Hague awaiting trial for his crimes.  This is state sponsored vigilanteism ordered by the President of the United States.  A crime does not automatically become an act of war because the government gives it a military name.

The part that bothers me the most is that Trump has ordered military officers to be complicit in committing crimes, crimes prohibited by their military oath and the Uniform Code of Military Justice.  In press conferences Hegseth and Trump present their crimes like snuff films.   

The New York Times has also reported on Ecuadorian fishermen who described attacks by English-speaking men wearing U.S. flag insignia. One fishing vessel disappeared with eight of its ten crew members still missing. The Times found evidence consistent with U.S. surveillance of the boats, although it could not establish who carried out the attacks.

I have no doubt that Americans were involved. Whether they were acting for the CIA, the Defense Department or the DEA.  I can’t prove it but it’s pretty obvious.  If we had a Congress I would demand they open an investigation.  Who are these people?  And who's paying them?   

For most of my lifetime, the United States has argued that there are laws governing war and rules protecting civilians and prisoners. We have violated those principles before. The Bush administration's torture program and indefinite detention after September 11 were enormous breaches of American law and international norms. The Obama administration's drone campaign raised grave questions about civilian casualties and targeted killings outside conventional battlefields.

These previous events make it more important than ever to acknowledge it now and take action.  We are further down the road to being a pariah state than ever before. 

Legal specialists cited by the Times have argued that these strikes amount to extrajudicial killings because the military may not deliberately kill civilians, including suspected criminals, who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

Perhaps the administration has a legal theory that will persuade the courts or historians.

But I look at the pictures of small boats exploding in the Caribbean and Pacific, and I see something much simpler.

The United States and its military are using the language of war to justify killing people accused of crimes, without arrest, trial or any opportunity to surrender. Whatever legal theory is offered, I believe the killings are wrong.

I am witnessing it. I am recording it. I object. 

And I will vote.

Let the Machines Do the Work

At the North Oakland Senior Center the other day, a group of us fell into the very common conversation about AI.  A couple of us actually use it.  We like it; we're cautious but optimistic.  Most of the other Seniors were uneasy.  They worried about jobs disappearing, about machines replacing human contact, about a world where you press buttons and never reach a person, where machines make decisions affecting our lives.  

The anxiety wasn’t abstract. It was personal, children, grandchildren, the future. AI is not the first time we’ve had fears like these. When television arrived in our homes, when calculators appeared in classrooms, when computers entered offices, when cellphones became universal, people said the same thing.  This will ruin us. Children wouldn’t be able to think. We won’t be able to concentrate. People today will lose basic skills. Our minds will turn to mush or worse yet our children’s minds. 

AI is different in one important way. It isn’t replacing muscle or just making an existing task faster. It is beginning to do routine brain work; work that required clerks and procedural work by professionals: entering information, sorting it, finding it, organizing it, producing reports. It can write routine documents, compare information, and interpret it. The changes won’t stop at the bottom. They are already reaching into the cubicles of lawyers, accountants, the examining rooms of doctors, and the work of radiologists, any job that requires routine analysis. 

During my transition from banker to Park Ranger I got to work as a temp in Morrison and Foerster’s mail room.  On my mail rounds I passed cell like offices of associates who spent their days cutting and pasting boilerplate language for briefs and contracts. It reminded me of medieval copyists. Much of that work is already automated. AI will finish the job once it is made foolproof from fictional citations.We have been using technology for centuries to do more work with less labor. Computers eliminated filing cabinets and much of the clerical work force. Every time we make jobs more productive, we create the possibility of having more of what we need with less work.

The question isn't whether AI will eliminate certain kinds of work.  It will.  The question is what we do with our time and the increase in productivity after those jobs are gone.  When we buy a dishwasher do we complain about the time we no longer spend washing dishes.  No, we use that time to do things we enjoy; watch TV, read a book, do macrame or maybe more time at our job.  

For a number of decades now it doesn’t seem like we’ve been using that saved time to live better.  We’ve been using it to produce more, consume more, work more, and make more money for those of us with the new skills required. We were once told that technological progress would give us leisure. Instead, we found ways to make more products working harder and longer. 

AI today gives us an opportunity to make that choice again.  To revisit the question we haven’t really addressed adequately.  What to do with our new productivity?

Where machines can handle more of the basic work of feeding, clothing, housing and organizing schedules, increasing productivity by doing more work with less labor, we create more profit from the same amount of human effort. We can spend that increased wealth on doing other things. It is a remarkable opportunity. If it takes less actual work to provide the things we need, we have more time and resources for things that machines cannot give us: caring for elders, teaching children, restoring wetlands, maintaining public spaces and parks, supporting communities, cooking, making things with our hands, making art, writing poems, welcoming strangers, comforting someone who is frightened.

Some years ago I got to be an EMT in a State Park.  When there was a road accident, I showed up.  The first thing I did was tell the patient “You’re going to be alright,” and then I gave them what first aid I could and got them ready to go the hospital. Then we waited for the distant ambulance to arrive.  Sometimes I would hold their hand or put my hand on their shoulder. Today AI can assess the situation, recommend treatment, come up with a plan, and alert an ambulance.  But AI can’t put it’s hand on someone’s shoulder or hold someone’s hand. 

The promise of AI should be to free us from work that machines do better, not to eliminate humans but to redirect our efforts to things that only humans can do.

The movie industry is especially anxious about AI, perhaps because AI can already produce the same formulaic, explosion‑heavy content that studios churn out. But that only proves the point: AI threatens the mechanical parts of creativity, not the human ones. The great films, the ones with real imagination, aren’t formulaic, and they aren’t threatened. AI can clear away the tedium, but it won’t replace inspiration.

The gains from increased productivity aren’t shared.  If AI eliminates 10 jobs that used to be required, the savings seem to go to the few, the owners, instead of the people making the sacrifice.  AI can be used to make life better for everyone.

It’s a political decision. I come from a long line of wage laborers. I’m not opposed to private enterprise. Ownership and markets drive innovation and make economies more efficient. But productivity should strengthen the Commonwealth, not just the ownership class. If the gains from technology are concentrated at the top while everyone else is told to work harder to keep up, we have used innovation to make a few people extraordinarily wealthy rather than to improve the quality of life for all of us.

We can imagine something better.

The Commonwealth is more than the economy. It is the quality of the life we share. If technology gives us more productive capacity and more time, we can choose to live better rather than simply produce more.  

Yes, I’m idealistic. But if we don’t have ideals, what do we have?

AI is here and more is coming. We cannot stop it, and I don’t think we should want to. The question is who is in charge of what happens next?  Corporations? Investors?  Or the voters.

Productivity should serve life. Innovation should raise the floor for everyone. If machines can do more of the work required to sustain us, then the measure of progress should not be how much harder we work. It should be how much better we can make life for all of us. 

 

 

This essay was written with AI assistance. Editing is like sanding. I used an electric sander to get there and then finished it by hand.

The Mojave Rock, a Buddha of Deep Time

On a road trip to Boulder City near Las Vegas, I stopped just past Baker looking for a place to nap, maybe stay overnight. I drove ¾ of a mile off the highway around a bend where there were no cars, no buildings and just a valley surrounded by hills, a deep bowl in the middle of the Mojave Desert. I love the Mojave.

The next morning as I looked around, there were volcanic buttes and outcroppings, alluvial black and red soil, washes and a few scrub trees. I was on a flattened and cleared area, where people had stopped for decades, to camp, drink beer, shoot guns, whatever people do in the desert. I walked around looking at the ground and seeing plants I’d never seen, an ant nest, the debris of previous visitors. To the side was a dry rivulet, a path where water runs when a rare storm passes.  Sitting in the middle of the cleared space away from the wash was a white and gray crystalline rock with green veins in it. All around it were red and black rocks and outcrops, the stuff of volcanoes, but here was a half buried, crystalline, igneous granite rock formed deep in the earth and different from anything in sight.

I picked it up to look at it.  Millions of years in formation, it was not rounded or a polished stone, not shaped by water or tumbling, not softened by an intermittent stream. It looked as if it had dropped out of the sky to this spot. It was angular, fractured, and rough. It had flat faces from ancient faults, jagged edges from recent fractures, and surfaces textured by desert weathering. It was not a cobble, not a river stone, it was an old rock, newly arrived from somewhere, a piece of the Earth that had never been touched by human intention until that moment. Like me it felt like a visitor in an ancient landscape.    

Of course, another story could be that someone collected it somewhere else in the valley and then decided it was not worth taking home and discarded it where I found it. 

This rock is now part of my personal mandala.  It is different from the other forms on my shelf, Shakyamuni, Guadalupe, Francis of Assisi, and Shiva the Hindu embodiment of transformation. These were shaped by human hands, carved, cast or molded to represent stories and traditions, expressions of devotion and imagination. To me they have meaning and power. But the Mojave rock is something else entirely. It is a manifestation of the Buddha that predates humanity, predates religion, predates culture, predates even the continents as we know them. It is the Buddha of deep time.

To hold this rock is to hold stardust. Every atom in it, silicon, oxygen, iron, calcium, was forged in ancient stars, scattered in supernovae, gathered into the early solar nebula, and drawn by gravity into forming the Earth nearly 5 billion years ago. Before it was granite, it was cosmic dust drifting in the darkness. Before it was a rock, it was part of the Earth’s inner chemistry. Its journey to the desert floor began billions of years before the Buddha Shakyamuni taught his fellow monks in Deer Park, before Mary appeared in Mexico, before Francis preached in Italy. 

Between 90 and 70 million years ago, this interior stardust had melted into magma deep beneath what would one day become the Mojave Desert. As the magma cooled, crystals formed, quartz, feldspar, biotite, each emerging from the molten mixture as conditions allowed. This was the rock’s first form, its first arising, its first suchness. It was not yet a rock you could hold, but it was becoming itself. To me crystallization is awakening: form emerging from formlessness, structure arising from potential.

As millions of years passed, the granite solidified completely. It became part of a vast batholith, a massive body of intrusive igneous rock buried miles underground. It was whole, unbroken, untouched. Then tectonic forces lifted it, fractured it, exposed it. Volcanic eruptions covered parts of it. Lakes and alluvial basins buried it and then revealed it. Hydrothermal fluids seeped into its cracks, depositing epidote and quartz, altering its chemistry, writing new stories into its veins. Weathering broke it into fragments. Freeze-thaw cycles cracked it further. Desert heat and cooling expanded and contracted it. Wind and time softened its exposed surfaces.

Eventually, a flash flood, decades ago or even centuries, carried this fragment downslope. Not far, but far enough to rest among volcanic debris where no granite outcrop was visible. It was moved quickly, violently, not tumbled and polished in a stream. It remained angular, raw, unrounded. It waited there, on the slope. On May 27, 2026 I walked by and saw it, an entity apart, a separate manifestation of the oneness that is the universe. It felt like a meeting arranged by time itself.

My karma met the rock’s karma. My life, my walking, my need for quiet, my curiosity, my attraction to the desert intersected the billions-year journey of the rock. I picked it up. I carried it home. I placed it on my shelf in Oakland, among representations of the Buddha as I understand the One.

But the rock is different. It is not a symbol of the Buddha. It is not a representation. It is not a crafted form. It is the Buddha in its own right, a manifestation of impermanence, interdependence, and suchness that has not been human-shaped. It is the dharma in mineral form. It is the teaching that does not require a story. It is Francis’ kinship with all beings extended to geology. It is Siddhartha’s insight into impermanence written in crystal and fracture.

The rock teaches without words. It shows that form arises from conditions, that nothing is permanent, that everything is interbeing, a part of the whole, interconnected. I see the Buddha not limited to human form or human stories. The Buddha is stardust, magma, crystal, fracture, weathering, movement, presence. The Buddha is the Earth itself.

One day, someone will take my rock from its shelf. They may throw it out. They may place it somewhere else. It may become part of the soil in Oakland or Mexico City. It may be buried, broken, dissolved, uplifted, melted, and returned to stardust. Its journey will continue long after my life has ended. It will be part of the Earth’s story for millions of years to come. Its future is as open as its past is vast.

This rock is a powerful manifestation on my shelf because it is not a symbol; it is reality. It is the Buddha, one with the universe itself. It is the dharma written in deep time. It is the truth of impermanence made visible. It is a reminder that awakening is not limited to human beings. It is, like everything we experience, Buddha nature.