Halloween, La Catrina in Oakland

I've told everyone who will listen that Halloween is an Irish contribution to American culture, a survival of the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, brought across the Atlantic by Irish immigrants and transformed into the holiday we celebrate today. I believed it, just another contribution from the Irish to American civilization.

So before writing this, I did a little research, just to confirm what I know already. It turns out that Halloween as we celebrate it is a thoroughly American holiday, a wonderful mash-up of traditions brought here by people from many different countries.  We Irish contributed our bit, the date in particular, but contrary to what I believed, we don't own Halloween.

For a less biased account of the holiday, I recommend Stephen Winick's post in the Library of Congress Folklife blog, Masking and Mumming for the Holidays, Thanksgiving Style!. It describes a custom in New York, Philadelphia, and the Northeast of children dressing up on Thanksgiving and going door to door asking for treats, a practice already well established in the nineteenth century. No Irish element to it.   

Samhain, celebrated at the end of October, marks the end of summer and the beginning of the dark half of the year. The harvest was done, the sheep brought down from the hills, and people began to settle in for the winter. It is a turning point in the year itself, one in Oakland we can't help but notice. The days are getting shorter. Summer is gone. It's chilly and soon we'll be going to work in early morning light and coming home in the dark.

For the Irish, Samhain is a dangerous time. The curtain between this world and the Otherworld dissolves. The dead walk the streets. Banshees, púcas, headless horsemen, witches, and the Aos Sí, the people of the fairy mounds, wander among the living. Fairies can kidnap people, particularly handsome children, and replace them with changelings. 

Irish fairies are powerful, unpredictable beings, sometimes malicious, and certainly deserving of respect. Disguising oneself is a way of hiding from the fairies.  It’s also possible some of the creatures knocking on your door this Saturday aren't children at all.  The fairies are among us.

Dressing up, making noise, frightening away spirits, and celebrating the change of seasons are hardly exclusive to the Irish.

The English have their mummers performing in masks, Morris dancers, and Guy Fawkes Night with bonfires and kids running wild. In the Fall, particularly Halloween there are apple games, bobbing for apples, firing off shotguns to scare away evil spirits and offering drinks to the apple trees in hopes of a good harvest.

Elsewhere in Europe, masking and begging are familiar seasonal activities. German Fasching, although celebrated between winter and spring, offers the same opportunity for disguising yourself, acting like a fool, and escaping the ordinary rules of respectable behavior.  There’s also Mardi Gras and Carnival. 

Mexico's Día de los Muertos brings another tradition into the picture, a blending of Indigenous beliefs about death and ancestors with the Catholic observances of All Hallows Eve, All Saints and All Souls. The three holy days coincide with much older pagan observances.   

What all these traditions share is something more basic than a common ancestry. People everywhere confront the changing seasons, the darkness, the uncertainty of winter, and the mystery of death. They respond with feasting, costumes, fire, music, laughter, and sometimes wild behavior.

And Americans, with our mixture of peoples and traditions, have made something new out of all of it.

When I was growing up in Southern California in the 1950s, Halloween was primarily a children's holiday. We dressed up, went from door to door, and collected candy, with an occasional nickel or dime thrown in.

We had to wait until dark to go out. That was important. The younger children went first. Then came the older kids, and finally the teenagers, who were often more interested in tricks than treats.

Some tricks were just outright vandalism. Halloween was and is an opportunity to rebel against adult authority, to ignore the rules. Sometimes the results are funny, sometimes destructive, and sometimes just plain mean.

There's something in human nature, particularly when people are young. We rebel, we break the rules, we don't have to do what old people want all the time. Halloween almost tolerates vandalism and tricks, and for some it goes too far. Maybe that's the point.

The threat is right in the words: trick or treat. Give us something, or you may regret it.

Back in the day, one of the costumes was a hobo; old clothes, dirt on the face, a battered hat, and a bundle on a stick. I think that is fa holdover from the ragamuffins of the nineteenth century and from the 1930s.

Those children dressed as beggars and tramps, going door to door asking for pennies, apples, or other treats. The Library of Congress article makes the case that these Thanksgiving customs contributed to the development of American trick-or-treating in the 1930s. After World War II, with the baby boom and suburban expansion, it became the great children's holiday I remember.

Of course, you don't have to persuade an eight-year-old to dress up and collect free candy. It's a custom that sells itself.

Something else I like about trick-or-treating. Just a little bit it redistributes wealth.

Here in Oakland, children from less prosperous neighborhoods sometimes travel up the hill to Montclair or to Piedmont, where the houses are bigger and the candy is better. Kids have always known where the good candy is. Word gets around quickly when somebody is handing out Reese's Peanut Butter Cups instead of the cheap stuff.

Occasionally a skinflint complains about children coming from outside the neighborhood, but most people tolerate the children and some neighborhoods welcome them.

There's no income qualification for trick-or-treating. Poor children can beg from rich people, rich children can beg from other rich people, and everybody gets something. For one evening, adults are expected to give, and children are entitled to ask.

It's ritualized begging, and I think it's a good custom. The gifts are small, but the generosity is real.

Halloween has changed since my childhood. It's now a major holiday for adults as well as children, with elaborate costumes, parties, decorations, and commercial haunted houses. In some neighborhoods, organized gatherings have replaced going door to door. People complain that Halloween isn't what it used to be.

Well, of course it isn't. The Halloween of my childhood wasn't the Halloween of the nineteenth century.

Traditions survive by changing. Each generation takes what it inherits and makes it its own.

The goblins, ghosts, hobos, and fairies wandering our streets are all visitors from the past, although some may be more real than others. At Samhain, the curtain between our world and the Otherworld dissolves, and the inhabitants of both worlds roam freely.

I still like to think the Irish gave Halloween some of its most interesting creatures. We certainly know the dangers of the fairy folk.

And if a banshee knocks on your door this Saturday night, I'd suggest giving her a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup. Maybe she's a child in a costume. Maybe not.

11 More Days. Then What?

 I think there is going to be a Blue Tsunami on November 3. Americans are dissatisfied with Trump, many of us are angry, and I expect there will be a very high Democratic turnout. Independents will turn out, too, and I suspect a good many Republicans will stay home rather than vote for candidates associated with Trump.

I’m not a very reliable observer. I’ve thought Trump was a loser for more than ten years now, and I’ve been disgusted with him since 2015 and earlier.

Still, I’m not alone in expecting a Democratic victory. The Cook Political Report has been moving congressional races toward the Democrats, as reported by Axios on October 9. The Senate is less certain, but Democrats have opportunities there too.

I think Democrats will take the House, possibly by a substantial margin, and I think they have a good chance of taking the Senate. I could be wrong. Elections have a way of surprising us.

But the size of the victory isn’t what worries me.

I’m worried about what happens after November 3.

I don’t think Trump will accept a Democratic victory, whether it’s a landslide or a narrow win. I don’t think the size of the vote will make any difference to his response. A decisive result might make his opposition harder to sustain, but I believe he will oppose it just the same.

Trump has a history of rejecting election results he doesn’t like. When he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016, he claimed that millions of illegal votes had been cast. After losing the 2020 election, he refused to accept the result, and we saw what happened on January 6, 2021.

I think some of Trump’s allies sincerely believe that only certain Americans should have their votes counted. Their definition of a legitimate American voter seems to exclude people they regard as outsiders, particularly immigrants and racial and religious minorities. I think some of them truly believe it.

And that makes me worry about what they might do.

Reuters recently published an excellent investigation, Nine Ways the Trump Administration Could Interfere With the Midterms. It examines possible actions involving federal law enforcement, election materials, certification disputes, and the seating of elected members of Congress.

I suspect we will see attempts to use several of those tactics. I can imagine challenges county by county, disruptions resembling the Brooks Brothers Riot during the Florida recount in 2000, and federal agencies becoming involved in disputes that properly belong to state and local election officials.

I don’t know how far Trump and his allies will go. I don’t know how far the courts will let them go. I don’t have complete confidence in the Supreme Court and I certainly don’t expect the Vice President or Speaker Mike Johnson to stand up to Trump.

I don’t think they can overturn a national election. I do think they can refuse to abide by its results.

They may be unable to change the votes, but they could try to prevent those votes from producing the government the voters elected. They could challenge certifications, obstruct the transition to a new congressional majority, or create enough confusion and confrontation to make the ordinary transfer of congressional power extraordinarily difficult.

The Constitution and the law provide protections against such actions. But laws don’t enforce themselves. They depend on public officials willing to carry out their responsibilities, even when doing so puts them at risk.

The real fight will begin on November 3.

And that frightens me.

I’m not predicting that Trump will succeed. I don’t think he will. But I don’t think stopping him will be easy either. We may be entering a period when the institutions of our democracy are tested in ways most of us have never experienced.

I expect a great deal will depend on the integrity and competence of state and county election officials, the independence of the courts, the willingness of members of Congress to honor election results, and the preparations already being made by organizations defending the electoral process.

As a citizen and a voter, I can only do what I’m capable of doing. I can demonstrate, write letters, publish articles, and make my voice heard. It doesn’t seem like much, but I will do what I can.

There’s a lot to worry about. The Democrats may disappoint me once they’re in office. I’ve certainly experienced that before. But first they have to be allowed to take office and exercise the authority the voters have given them.

In the meantime, I’ll pray, organize, and trust the American people. I don’t have much choice.

The Professor Has a Hundred Papers to Grade

Imagine a college history professor on Friday afternoon. He has a hundred student essays to grade, and the grades are due Monday morning.

I went to college more than fifty years ago. Maybe professors don't assign papers the way they used to. I hope they do.

A hundred essays on eighteenth-century France, perhaps. Some will be excellent, some acceptable, and some terrible. By Sunday evening, after reading about the French Revolution for the seventy-fifth time, even a conscientious professor might begin to lose his enthusiasm for the subject.

Now suppose he has an AI assistant.

He asks it to sort the papers roughly into Poor, Acceptable, and Good. Originality matters. Accuracy matters. A coherent argument supported by evidence matters. Elegant prose is desirable, but it cannot rescue an argument that makes no sense.

In a few minutes, the machine has done its preliminary work.

The professor still has to grade the essays. He examines the evaluations, reads enough of each paper to satisfy himself that the judgements are reasonable, and gives particular attention to questionable cases. He checks the better papers for originality and the weaker ones for arguments the machine may have overlooked.

Over time, he learns how much he can trust the machine, discovers its weaknesses, and develops his own methods for using it. He remains responsible for the grades and for treating his students fairly.

I suspect something like this is inevitable. Professors are no more likely to spend an entire weekend doing work a machine can help them do than they are to insist that students submit typewritten essays corrected with white-out.

And if professors can use AI to evaluate essays, why shouldn't students use AI to write them?

When I was in college, writing a paper involved considerable mechanical labor. There were outlines, drafts, handwritten corrections, typing, retyping, and trips to the library. A professor might receive a thoughtful paper that was badly typed, misspelled, and covered with corrections.

Word processors changed much of that. Spell-checking helped enormously. Nobody seriously argues that a student who uses a word processor has cheated.

AI goes considerably further, of course. It can research, organize, suggest arguments, write paragraphs, and sometimes produce a remarkably good first draft.

But what matters is what the student does with it.

A student might ask AI to write an essay on eighteenth-century France, accept the result without reading it carefully, and submit it as his own work. I would call that cheating.

Another student might begin with an AI draft, spend hours examining sources, correcting errors, questioning interpretations, developing an original argument, and rewriting the essay until it expresses what the student actually thinks.

That student has done considerable intellectual work. Why should the resulting essay be regarded as less worthy because a machine helped produce it?

I would judge the essay.

Are the sources genuine? Does the evidence support the conclusions? Is the argument coherent? Does the student have something original to say? Is it interesting to read?

I certainly wouldn't rely on an AI detector that announces, with impressive mathematical confidence, that an essay is 100 percent AI-generated. Such a score tells us very little about the intellectual work that went into the paper.

If a student believes an AI-assisted grading system has made a mistake, there should be an appeal. The student can bring drafts, notes, sources, or whatever else helps establish the case. The professor then exercises his own judgement.

He might say, “I believe you spent twenty hours writing this paper. Unfortunately, it's still a C.”

But there is a harder question.

Suppose AI produces an excellent essay without much help from the student. The sources are accurate, the argument original, and the writing genuinely good. The student reads it, makes a few changes, and submits it.

Does that essay deserve an A?

My first inclination is to say no. The student hasn't done the work. But what if the student knows the subject thoroughly, recognizes the quality of the argument, and knows how to direct AI to produce exactly what they wanted?

Wouldn't those be valuable skills in the world outside the university? An employer might be delighted to have such a person.

Still, there's a difference between recognizing a good argument and knowing how to construct one. The intellectual struggle of putting ideas together is itself part of an education.

When I was at UCLA, we took examinations in blue books, those little booklets of lined paper in which students wrote answers by hand. No library, no telephone, no AI, just what you knew and could think about while sitting in a classroom.

I remember a Shakespeare class in which students took copious notes, presumably expecting to reproduce what the professor had told them. Then came the examination question:

Discuss Shakespeare's concept of tragedy.

There wasn't a single correct answer. You had to know the plays, think about them, make connections, and develop an argument. The prose didn't have to be elegant, but the answer had to make sense.

That's something I wouldn't want universities to lose.

Perhaps the solution is to let students use AI in preparing papers while also requiring them, occasionally, to demonstrate what they know without it. A blue-book examination would do. So might a short oral examination in which the student explains and defends the argument in a paper bearing their name.

We could judge the quality of the work and the knowledge of the student without pretending they're necessarily the same thing.

There is another complication: originality.

I've admired the extraordinary fanciful creatures created by the Mexican artist Pedro Linares, the alebrijes. His imagination gave them a vitality that many of the imitations sold in Mexican curio shops seem to lack. Some are beautifully made, but something is missing.

I sometimes have the same reaction to AI writing. It can be excessively orderly, pleased with its own clarity, and remarkably reluctant to say anything awkward or unexpected. It may be technically accomplished and yet lifeless.

We sometimes call that missing quality soul.

But what exactly is it? Human beings produce plenty of lifeless writing, and a beautiful work doesn't cease to be beautiful because it was influenced by another artist. Art has always borrowed, imitated, and transformed what came before.

AI makes the question more complicated because it can already do so much of what humans do when they create. Whether it can produce that elusive quality we call soul, or whether we will even be able to recognize the difference, I don't know.

And I certainly wouldn't want a professor grading a student's paper on the suspicion that it lacked a soul.

I would rather judge the writing for what it accomplishes and find other ways to determine what the student has learned.

After all, universities aren't simply factories for producing essays. Their purpose is to educate people. I want students to learn history, to think critically, to question sources, to recognize good arguments, and to communicate clearly. I also want them to learn how to use the tools that will be part of their working lives.

AI can help with all of that. It can also become a substitute for doing any of it. The challenge is to know the difference.

And professors should use their own intelligence and experience to make those judgements, even when a machine helps them reach them.

The professor has a hundred papers to grade.

Let him use a little help.

Let the students use some help, too.

And let them both exercise good judgement.

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.