When Engineering Becomes Culture: The Texas Transportation Museum

  

Every field needs a foundational philosophy, and I've never found a better one for ethics than St. Thomas Aquinas's fundamental principle of moral philosophy.  While I can't cite chapter and verse for an exact quote, it goes something like this:  "The good ought to be done and evil avoided." 

 

Sounds kind of obvious when you put it into words.  And of course, it raises the question of what is good and what is evil.  But citing that principle allows me to place the Texas Transportation Museum under the wide umbrella of engineering ethics.  In what follows, I'll try to answer the question, "Is the Texas Transportation Museum a good thing?"

 

I was unaware of its existence until a few weeks ago when I was looking for a place to take a day trip and discovered its website.  It's located just north of the San Antonio International Airport on a few dozen acres of ground donated in 1963 by the City of San Antonio to a collection of railroad enthusiasts headed by a consulting engineer named David Wallace and his friends.  The organization celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2024, and is still going as strong as an all-volunteer outfit can go.

 

Its roots as a railroad museum are obvious, as it houses numerous model-train exhibits as well as all kinds of historical memorabilia having to do with railroads.  On display outside are some full-scale artifacts from the golden years of passenger rail: a Pullman sleeping car from the 1920s, a caboose, and a steam locomotive—minus some of its hardware, true, but retaining most of the major components.  Other forms of transportation receive a nod.  In their large interior display, they have a Model A Ford, an antique fire truck, a horse-drawn steam-powered fire engine, and two or three other cars from the 1910s and 1920s.  But it's clear from the displays and the interest shown by the volunteer staff that the core of the museum is rail.

 

Maybe it's a peculiarity of American culture that a mode of transportation that for people, anyway, is largely in the past still has such an active following among primarily amateur historians.  And artists, too.  If I had to categorize the hobby of model train construction and use, I'd have to say it's art.  Like other art, it exists simply to be admired.  A friend of mine has practiced this art for decades, and although he just turned 80, he still hauls his three-by-four-foot modules of N-scale tracks and engines and boxcars around to train shows and sets them up with other fans to form convention-center-size layouts.  We don't see painters joining together on selected weekends to mount their paintings together to form one giant mural on display for a couple of days, but that's sort of what model railroaders do. 

 

And what is portrayed in this type of art?  In a word, the past.  At the Texas Transportation Museum, it's a wide-ranging past, going from the Civil War days of the hijacked wartime locomotive "The General" (the story of which a short description is on display, though it doesn't mention the Buster Keaton silent film that dramatized it) to the modern era of Amtrak.  Among the volunteers on duty were a woman in her sixties who took our money at the ticket desk, while wearing hair dyed orange, green, and blue for Halloween.  (Scattered everywhere were a lot of Halloween-themed decorations:  skeletons on tractors, dismembered limbs in Pullman fold-down beds, and other representations of our modern tacky enthusiasm for cheap horror.)  Her son, who politely held the door for us and told us when the free train ride would be, had a slight speech impediment but impeccable manners.  There were volunteers as young as a couple of men in their twenties, and as old as me, and anywhere in between. 

 

One gentleman I spent some time talking with was operating a G-scale layout that was reached by walking through an archway leading to a large garden.  G-scale, as he explained, stands for "garden."  The equipment is about 1/32 of full scale, which means the track rails are about two inches apart, and an engine is a little smaller than a small loaf of bread.  He talked about the problems of running an electric train outdoors.  The tree sap falls on the rails and interrupts the current, so every now and then he has to send around a cleaning car that has a vibrating brush that scrubs the rails.  Only the cleaning car was busted for a while and nobody knew it, so they had to fix it.  Deer and squirrels cause problems too, and there's always the wheels on the engine that need periodic cleaning.  I told him about my friend who is always battling some issue or other with his layout, and the man said, "Yes, it's never finished." 

 

But when everything runs smoothly, a model train layout gives one the sensation of God-like presence in a celestial realm above the workaday small-scale reality of the display.  And to the extent one can control the train movements through modern digital technology, one has God-like powers of transforming one's will into action.  Above all, the model railroader knows that everything in the layout is there because he put it there.  (I've seen a few lady model railroaders, but they are uncommon—it seems to be almost exclusively a male hobby.) 

 

So does the Texas Transportation Museum fulfill the injunction to do the good and avoid the evil?  I'll let the final words be those of the man who spoke briefly about the museum at the end of the few-hundred-yard excursion we took on an open passenger carriage towed by a genuine Army-surplus diesel locomotive.  He said the goal of the museum was to preserve the memory of railroads and other transportation so that the younger generation could see how things were back then, and keep the tradition going.  He also hoped people would come back for their Halloween show that they would be running the next few weekends from 5 to 9 PM, and not forget the Christmas show either.  His emotions were clearly more powerful than his words, but he thinks the Museum is a good thing, and he hopes it will continue.  Judging by the enthusiasm of a cowboy-hatted eight-year-old whose parents drove down from Dallas just so he could see the Texas Transportation Museum, I think his hope may be fulfilled. 

 

Sources:  The Texas Transportation Museum's website is https://www.txtransportationmuseum.org/, and it is open most weekends except for major holidays, weather permitting.  General admission is currently $10 a person, but donations are encouraged. 

On AI and Personhood: Pagans Will Be Pagans

  

Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, did a thorough job the other day of taking down the pronouncements of an Anthropic expert tasked with understanding why Anthropic AI systems like Claude behave the way they do.  A New York Times report on a day-long seminar given by Christopher Olah inspired Smith to write a long list of things Claude can't do, in contrast to Olah, who spent all day making the case that Claude should be considered as a person, not just a machine.

 

Olah described tracking Claude's "emotional vectors" and showed transcripts of conversations with one AI model which appeared to be having a nervous breakdown.  He speculated that just as humans sometimes benefit from the act of confession, maybe Claude might find the Catholic sacrament useful as well.  A rabbi who was present said that Olah and his colleagues appeared to believe that Claude models have the moral standing of a human being, and should be accorded the same rights and respect. If that is the case, the rabbi concluded, then what Anthropic is doing with their models amounts to slavery. 

 

Olah's response to this accusation was not recorded. But it doesn't matter, because Olah and his fellow AI creators are following a well-worn path that stretches back to antiquity:  the path of pagans worshipping the god they created. 

 

Smith is exactly right when he pointed out in his column that Claude is not alive, has no intrinsic value, is not conscious, does not think, cannot "feel," cannot suffer, can be damaged but not harmed, and cannot sin.  But if he thinks that well-thought-out evidence-based philosophical assertions of the non-personal status of Claude and its ilk are going to cause scales to fall from the AI community's eyes and make them say, "We see now!  It's just a machine!" he better have another think coming.  Pagans who invest a lot of work in their creations aren't easily dissuaded by some philosophical musings.  Sometimes the only thing that will convince them is power:  a power greater than their god.

 

In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, Chapter 5 recounts how the pagan Philistines captured the Hebrews' Ark of the Covenant and set it in their temple devoted to the pagan god Dagon.  The first night, the statue of Dagon fell over face down in front of the Ark.  After the Philistines set him up again, the next morning they found him face downward again, this time with his head and hands cut off.  After that, they decided that maybe the Ark wasn't such a good interior decoration after all, and passed it around to their friends the Ashdodites and Ekronites, to whom a plague of death and tumors happened.  While these incidents probably didn't lead to any conversions to Judaism, it did teach the pagans a lesson that the God of Israel was not to be messed with.

 

The Jewish prophet Isaiah had some choice words to say about a man who cuts down a tree and burns some of it to bake bread.  Then he turns around and uses the rest of the wood to make himself an idol:  "Half of it he burns in the fire . . . 'Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!'  And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol; and falls down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, 'Deliver me, for thou art my god!'"

 

We are living at a time when old philosophical arguments and ancient pagan ways are emerging into the headlines and the living rooms of millions.  When you ask your Siri device to play jazz, what are you talking to?  The line between use and worship is not always easy to distinguish.  Everyone has the urge to worship something, and it's only natural that people who spend their working lives developing cutting-edge AI models are going to be impressed by what the work of their hands can do.  The urge to anthropomorphize AI, to spend time and emotional investment in it like it was another human being, and even to argue for its legal rights, are all understandable. 

But like all pagan worship of false gods, such moves end sooner or later in disaster, both personal and institutional.

 

I have a friend—a real flesh-and-blood person—who will listen to a news report of some complicated jam that such people have gotten themselves into, and quite often the first thing he'll say is, "Those folks need Jesus."  And he's right. 

 

We can philosophize all day and quote every philosopher from Aristotle to Roger Scruton in trying to convince AI worshippers of the fact that machines aren't people, and all the "can'ts" Wesley Smith lists are true.  But most of the AI crowd would first have to take two semesters of philosophy before they could understand what we are talking about, and even then they'd probably find some way to disagree. 

 

The followers of the Hebrew God knew what was going on with the Ark and the pagans.  Followers of Jesus know what is going on with AI worshippers.  Our first task is not to fall into the trap of idol worship ourselves.  A Martian observing a random sample of one hundred U. S. citizens on a typical day would conclude that the little oblong objects they spend so much time staring at must be something either religious or necessary to survival, or both.  Christians should be different.

 

And the next task is to live lives and do acts that convince nonbelievers of the power of God.  That's not much in evidence today, I have to admit, though there are exceptions, especially in cultures that are not saturated with modernity.  Christians don't have to absolutely reject AI and all its works, which is in any case practically impossible.  (I used Google's AI feature to look up the Old Testament references for this blog.)  But we can resist making AI an idol ourselves, and live as lights in a dark world that warms itself with half its electricity and creates AI idols with the other half.  Some things never change. 

 

Sources:  Wesley J. Smith's article "AI 'Claude' Can Never Be a Person" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ai-claude-can-never-be-a-person/.  The story of the Philistines and the Ark appears in 1 Samuel 5:1-5.  The selection from Isaiah is Isaiah 44:15-17 (Revised Standard Version). 

Judge Says All Texas Prisons to be Air-Conditioned by 2029

  

Last Tuesday, Sept. 22, U. S. District Judge Robert Pitman ruled that the Texas state prison system must install air conditioning for every last one of its prison beds no later than Dec. 31, 2029.  According to an Associated Press report, Texas prison administrators have vowed to appeal this ruling, so it is far from a done deal.  But this event is a landmark in the long and sweaty road toward providing prisoners something that has become to other Texans almost as necessary as food and water in the summertime.

 

Texas and air conditioning go back a long way.  The first church building to be air-conditioned west of the Mississippi, and possibly in the entire U. S., was the Lutcher Memorial First Presbyterian Church of Orange, a town in the extreme southeast corner of the state.  Oil was discovered nearby in 1913, and the newly prosperous residents paid for not only a state-of-the-art air-conditioning system to be installed for the relatively small 150-member congregation, but also for a separate building to house the diesel engines that ran the ammonia compressors.  You see, Orange did not yet have an electric utility, but that didn't stop the Orange Presbyterians.  And the humid pollen-laden summer streets of Houston saw another air-conditioning first in 1930 when a wealthy businessman suffering from hay fever paid to get a custom-installed air conditioner in his Cadillac, apparently the first passenger vehicle so provided in the U. S.

 

So with such a glorious history of air conditioning, why has Texas been so far behind when it comes to air-conditioning prisons?  The answer depends on who you ask.

 

The prison administrators themselves say it will cost too much.  They have been pegging away at air-conditioning one unit here and another unit there for many years, but as of the end of 2026, they estimate that only 60,000 prison beds will be in air-conditioned spaces.  That's less than half of the approximately 143,000 people housed in Texas prisons today.  In the system's defense, this does represent progress compared to eight years ago, when in 2018 only 35,000 beds were air-conditioned. 

 

But people are still dying of the heat inside Texas prisons—three in 2023 alone.  A prison sentence should not turn into a death-by-heatstroke sentence.  And besides the avoidable human suffering that old un-air-conditioned prisons cause, the prison administrators have admitted that the lack of air conditioning in prisoner spaces has made it harder to recruit guards and other staff.  Working in a prison is no picnic, and if you add to it the fact that you're likely to be dealing with 100-degree-plus airless environments as well, I'm surprised they can find anybody to work under such conditions no matter how well they're paid. 

 

There is plenty of blame to go around in this situation.  During the 2023 legislative cycle, the state had a budget surplus of $33 billion.  Out of that surplus, the Texas legislature in its wisdom decided to allocate a measly $85 million to prison air conditioning.  While that did help, it fell far short of air-conditioning every Texas prison, which the prison system itself estimates will cost on the order of $1.5 billion.  This situation reminds me of the engineering adage:  "If there's not enough time (or money) to do it right, there's always enough time to do it over." 

 

The lawsuit leading to the recent ruling was filed initially by Bernie Tiede, a former mortician whose life story (and life sentence for murder) inspired the wickedly funny Richard Linklater film "Bernie."  Other prisoner-rights groups joined in the suit, and there was rejoicing among these and other prisoner advocates when the news of the decision reached them.

 

Now it is true that once upon a time, no prison was air-conditioned anywhere.  And once upon a time, say around 1910 before air conditioning was a thing in Texas, there were only 3.9 million people in the state, not 32 million.  And those few rugged souls were used to living in hot houses, going to work in hot stores and offices, and just sucking it up. 

 

Virtually no one in Texas lives that way today, including members of the criminal class.  If there were some weird sociological phenomenon that prevented anyone with a present or future criminal record from living with air conditioning outside prisons, it would be reasonable not to air-condition Texas prisons, much as Muslims are provided with copies of the Quran—it's what they're used to having, or not having.

 

But that is not the case.  I don't know of any medical studies that would confirm this, but it's likely that people not used to spending most of their time in 100+ temperatures are physiologically vulnerable to heat stroke and related ills when put into such temperatures.  At any rate, Judge Pitman ruled that subjecting prisoners to such conditions now amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, which is prohibited by the U. S. Constitution.  And the Texas Department of Criminal Justice now has less than four years to fix the situation.

 

Administratively, they are between a rock and a hard place.  While their estimate of over a billion dollars may be high, they can't spend money they don't have.  And it would be an exercise in Pollyannaish optimism to expect the Texas legislature next year to calmly and deliberately hand over the money needed to air-condition people who can't even vote for them in many cases. 

 

But miracles can happen, and maybe we really will see all Texas prisons air-conditioned before the expiration of the twelfth decade after those Presbyterians exulted in their 70-degree comfort in the steamy summer of 1914 in Orange.  Mind you, I have nothing against Presbyterians.  But everybody in the state government who can do something about this situation should read Luke 16:19-31, in which Jesus tells about the rich man who walked by the poor, sick Lazarus every day without helping him.  Lazarus died and went to be comforted by Father Abraham.  When the rich man died, he found himself in very warm conditions indeed, warmer even than a Texas prison in August.  To the Texas legislators and prison administrators I will only say, it can happen to you.

 

Sources:  The AP article reporting the decision by Judge Pitman is at https://apnews.com/article/hot-texas-prison-judge-ruling-air-conditioning-fa2f1997bd77b47129cdfe5c2350332d.  The First Presbyterian Church of Orange (still standing, with the power-plant building behind it) had its air conditioning described in Ice & Refrigeration, vol. 46, June 1914, pp. 309-310.  The first air-conditioned car is recounted in Raymond Arsenault's essay "The End of the Long Hot Summer:  The Air Conditioner and Southern Culture" in The Journal of Southern History, vol. 50, Nov. 1984, pp. 597-628.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Judge Pitman.

Should We Run For the Hills From AI?

  

In the last few weeks, at least two well-publicized resignations from AI firm Anthropic have drawn attention to the pace at which AI models are getting more powerful all the time.  Anthropic's safety head Mrinank Sharma has stated his intention to resign as of next Feb. 8 in an open letter.  And Jacob Coxon has stated in an X thread that "the people building AI earnestly believe it could kill us all by the end of the decade."  According to Wikipedia, Anthropic's leading safety researcher, Evan Hubinger, says that there is a greater than 10% chance that AI systems could "kill all humans" in the next ten years.

 

Reactions to these outcries have ranged from indifference to panic or cynicism, with some noting that Anthropic is planning an initial public offering of stock this coming November.  Recalling the adage that there's no such thing as bad publicity, meaning that just getting your name out there is more important than what they're saying about you, this last take may have a grain of truth in it.  But the more likely explanation for this spate of criticisms and resignations is that something is going on in AI firms that scares the socks off some of those working on it.

 

Predictions of superintelligent systems taking over the world are not new.  I have on my shelf a book by Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom called Superintelligence that was published in 2014.  In it he examines in thorough detail the various ways that AI could break bad, and discusses possible countermeasures humanity can take.  After three hundred pages of analysis that examines most if not all of the disaster scenarios that people are discussing today, he concludes]the book with these words:  "In this situation, any feeling of gee-wiz [sic] exhilaration would be out of place.  Consternation and fear would be closer to the mark; but the most appropriate attitude may be a bitter determination to be as competent as we can, much as if we were preparing for a difficult exam that will either realize our dreams or obliterate them."

 

The main fear is that AI will get out of control in some harmful way.  That has already happened with the hacking of the cloud-computing company Hugging Face by OpenAI models that were supposed to be isolated in a "sandbox," but managed to escape and damage a good portion of Hugging Face's infrastructure.  This is the most well-publicized example of an AI system that did something bad that its supposed controllers did not intend.  OpenAI says that it's taken measures to prevent such incidents in the future, but as we have pointed out elsewhere, this incident looks a lot like a warning that worse things could happen if AI firms don't implement vastly more secure means to keep experimental AI models under control.

 

The leaders of several AI firms in the U. S. have considered a mutual arrangement to slow down the pace of improvements to allow security measures to keep up.  This has caused concerns that China will catch up to or surpass U. S. competence in AI.  Discussions of government regulation have been discouraged by President Trump, who seems to have never met an AI model he didn't like (never mind about other kinds of models).  So if the government isn't going to do anything significant, and the companies can't get together on how to moderate the pace of improvement, what should the average citizen do?

 

Harking back to an existential threat that I experienced when I was in my twenties, the threat of nuclear annihilation was ever-present as I was growing up.  Nobody I knew developed nuclear weapons, but we all had to live with the consequences of the two superpowers being able to vaporize each other in a matter of a few hours.  There's an existential threat for you.  Somehow (my own hypothesis is it was the grace of God), we have managed to get from then to now without ending it all in a forest of mushroom clouds. 

 

AI is a different kind of threat, admittedly.  The kinds of systems that are most vulnerable to it seem to partake of the nature of AI itself:  large-scale networked systems that are centrally controlled.  There are certain infrastructure vulnerabilities in the U. S. that genuinely concern me, notably the fragile nature of  power grids.  They rely on substation transformers that cost upwards of millions of dollars, are hugely inconvenient to repair or replace, and are very limited in supply.  There have been news reports recently about how a concentrated and coordinated attack on substations nationwide—either physical, which would be hard to do, or a cyberattack, which might be a lot easier—could cripple the grid enough to leave large swathes of the U. S. without electric power for months.  That could lead to a civilization-destabilizing crisis.

 

Fortunately, there are some things we can do about this.  One is ramping up production of spare transformers (preferably making them in the U. S.) so that we have enough to replace as many as we might lose in a widespread attack.  Another is to take advantage of smart-grid capabilities now coming online to make it possible to operate pieces of the grid without having it all interlocked together.  As more renewable sources come online that are distributed rather than coming in a few big lumps like traditional power plants, one can imagine making the power grid more like the internet, which was designed to be robust against damage to a good many of its nodes. 

 

I'm not a power-systems engineer and this may be a fantasy, but it seems like it's within the realm of possibility.  Of course, determined hackers can wreck even well-protected infrastructure.  But making the grid more local, which is what we're really talking about, makes it harder for an attacker to take down all of it.  If local pieces have to be dealt with one by one, there is safety in variety.

 

I hope we can keep AI under control to the extent that the benefits outweigh the liabilities.  But if the history of engineering ethics is any guide, though, we will learn how to do this by dealing with the aftermath of some failures first.

 

Sources:  I referred to posts by Mrinank Sharma at https://www.linkedin.com/posts/andrew-hilger-436b713_the-attached-resignation-letter-from-mrinank-activity-7427113299336454144-4CVm/and Jacob Coxon at https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476196791709843 as well as the Wikipedia articles on "Existential risk from artificial intelligence" and "OpenAI-Hugging Face incident."

 

Update on Reader Survey:  As I suspected, there appear to be relatively few of you who read this blog regularly.  But I am very grateful to all nine who responded to the survey, and hope there are a few more who didn't bother to respond but still read it regularly.  You are in exclusive company!

 

Survey for Engineering Ethics Blog Readers

   

As promised last week, today I am asking my readers to take the usual three to five minutes you would use to read my blog, and instead complete a short survey which can be found at

 

https://forms.gle/75G4ZxDZFJyNcaD19

 

It consists only of two multiple-choice questions and two optional comment spaces, so it's not like I'm asking you to spend a lot of time on it.  Indications from the statistics that the blogger system provides are that relatively few of you are regular readers.  Most visitors to the website show up because they are directed here by interest in a particular issue I happen to be addressing.

 

Whatever your reading habits, I would like to hear from you.  The regular blog will resume next week.

 

Karl Stephan

AI Use in Academia: Is Everything Not Forbidden Compulsory?

  

In T. H. White's imaginative fantasy of the youth of King Arthur, The Once and Future King, the magician Merlin transforms Arthur into a variety of animals in order to teach him the virtues he will need in human society.  One of the most chilling transformations comes about when Merlin launches him into an ant colony.  Suddenly Arthur can hear the constant drone of instructions from on high, and read the ever-present propaganda posters that tell him how regimented the lives of ants are.  One particular sign encapsulates the essence of totalitarianism that leaves no room for free will:  "Everything Not Forbidden Is Compulsory."

 

Over the past year I have observed how artificial-intelligence propaganda, if you want to call it that, has pervaded the workplace and, after the usual delay, has washed up on the shores of academia.  At the beginning of the fall semester, just before classes began, I received an invitation to a two-day AI seminar in which a new faculty member would be conducting exercises in how to create a website with AI, how to use it in research and administrative tasks, and more.  Besides invitations from our school director, I received an email directly from the person conducting the seminar the day before it began.  I'm sure he did a good job with the seminar, although I wasn't able to attend it due to some prior travel I'd planned.  But my confidence in the project was not increased when I noted that in the email from the seminar leader, he had misspelled the word "tomorrow."  Either he didn't take his own advice and skipped letting AI check his emails, or the AI system thought he was trying to be funny.

 

It is becoming increasingly clear that anybody in a business that could be described in George Gilder's phrase as symbolic manipulation—and that definitely includes academics—will soon be effectively forced to use AI for any substantial workflow processes.  The reason is simple.  If people who use AI begin producing at a rate that equals what three or four or ten people can do unaided by AI, those who refrain from boosting their output with AI will begin to look like slackers.  If competition is a factor in keeping one's job, as it always is for untenured faculty and continues in some form after tenure, using AI in a way that boosts your output will soon be necessary.

 

I'm in a peculiar position in that a year ago, I began what is called phased retirement, in which I work half-time for three years with an option to continue after that.  The one course I teach involves a hands-on lab course.  Until they bring me an AI robot that can help students figure out what is wrong with a circuit they built, I don't see how AI is going to be of much direct help in the lab. 

 

I'm not an AI Luddite. A few months ago I bought a subscription to Claude and got it to do a few things.  It was an interesting experience, and probably saved me some time compared to how long the tasks would have taken without it.  But there's a learning curve involved in writing effective AI prompts, and I would probably have to use it every day to get good enough at it to be able to say my net productivity had increased.  From what I understand, Claude is now free to faculty members on request, so I'll probably let my subscription lapse.  But I'm still not sure what I'll do with it.

 

The application of the ant-colony slogan to this situation is fairly obvious.  The much-abused concept of academic freedom includes the right (privilege?) of deciding what methods and approaches I will use in teaching my class.  If I am strongly urged, through peer pressure and cheerleading emails, to use AI in teaching, my freedom isn't breached, exactly, but neither is it enhanced.  Nobody has ordered me to start using AI, so my university is very far from an ant colony, although an observer during the break between classes might be forgiven for likening the campus to what happens when you kick over an ant bed. 

 

I'm old enough to remember the transition from the secretarial pool where you took your hand-written report to be typed up, to the word processor programs we were given on our new computer terminals and told to use for reports from now on.  There was some grumbling among the older staff, and I remember one professor who agreed to start using the word processor, but insisted on retaining his secretary to deal with all his emails.  Both he and the secretary have presumably retired by now.  It was an annoying transition for a few years, and produced a lot of badly spelled and composed memos before spell-check programs were added.  But now, personal secretaries are like personal jets, reserved only for members of the very highest reaches of an organization, and everybody else makes do with their own hands on the keyboard.

 

Besides, even without meaning to use AI, I've started using it by simply doing the same kinds of things I've done for a while, such as consulting Google.  It now defaults to AI mode, and you have to positively turn it off if you don't want the AI summary as a response to your inquiry.  As an example, I was pretty sure that the forbidden-compulsory quote was from The Once and Future King, but I asked Google to make sure, as I don't have a copy of the book handy.  Google's AI Overview not only confirmed me in my suspicion, but quoted the exact passage, and appended an explanation of the context, "a world completely stripped of individual free thought and personal freedom." 

 

So if I get a poll in a few months—probably AI-generated—asking me how I'm using AI in my teaching, research, or service, I'll be able to check a little box saying in effect, "Yes, Master, I'm using AI."  But not necessarily because I want to, or because I think it makes me better at what I do.  Simply because as it's no longer forbidden, it's well on the way to becoming compulsory.

 

Sources:  T. H. White's The Once and Future King was published in 1958. 

 

NOTE:  Next week, instead of the usual blog, I will publish a reader's poll.  I currently receive virtually no feedback of any form from publishing this blog.  This poll will be your opportunity to (a) let me know somebody reads the blog and (b) give me suggestions for improvement.  So don't be surprised, as you have been warned.

Deadly Negligence at Washington State Paper Mill

  

In July of 2025, inspectors hired by the Nippon Dynawave Packaging Company to assess the condition of a tank at the firm's Washington State paper mill in Longview delivered some bad news.  The tank contained "white liquor," a highly corrosive solution of sodium hydroxide (lye) and sodium sulfide used to break down wood pulp in the initial stages of papermaking.  The inspection by Applied Technical Services LLC showed that the wall thickness of the tank had deteriorated in the lower portions below the minimum safe wall thickness, and the tank was in danger of collapsing.  The inspector's report stated that the tank was "not fit for continued service unless corrected."

 

However, despite the urgency of the report, apparently no repairs were made to the tank, and it continued to be used until the following May 26.  On that date, a digestor that used the tank's output was taken out of service, but white liquor continued to flow into the tank until it reached its capacity in excess of 900,000 gallons.  Just to make clear what a lot of liquid that is, 900,000 gallons would fill a cube fifty feet (15 meters) high, long, and wide.

 

A little after 7 A. M. that day, a wall of the tank collapsed, sending most of that 900,000 gallons cascading through a parking lot, breaking down building walls, and flowing into meeting rooms where workers were already gathering for the day.  A total of 11 people died in the accident, and several more workers and first responders were severely injured, suffering chemical burns. 

 

The facts relating to the tank inspection were released as part of a preliminary report by the U. S. Chemical Safety Board, the national agency charged with investigating major accidents involving chemicals.  The board's chairman, Steve Owens, stated "we are greatly concerned that the tank was not promptly removed from service or properly repaired after the clear findings in the inspection report." 

 

And the findings were definitely clear.  The Wikipedia page on the disaster reproduces a graph of average wall thickness versus height for the tank.  At the "course" (basically a circumferential row of steel plates) that was at a height of between 7.5 and 15 feet, the calculated minimum safe thickness was 0.5 inches.  But the measurements, presumably performed by some type of externally applied thickness-measuring device, showed that the average thickness was as low as 0.25 inches to 0.3 inches.  Clearly, the tank, and the plant and its workers, were living on borrowed time.

 

News reports failed to reveal why the inspection was made, but clearly there were concerns about the tank's integrity that inspired it.  What appears to be inexcusable is the fact that the plant's management did nothing about the critical safety issue discovered by the report until the tragedy occurred.

 

The plant is still out of service following the accident.  Company officials reached for comment refused to comment on "individual findings or documents."  But clearly, wrongful-death lawsuits filed against the company have received a boost from the Chemical Board findings.

 

Maintaining a safe environment in a complex chemical plant is a continual battle against thousands of hazards that are kept at bay only by constant vigilance, enforcement of rigid rules, and inspections such as the one that revealed the tank's too-thin walls.  The physics behind the strength-of-materials engineering that sets limits for tank wall thinning has been known since the nineteenth century.  And modern nondestructive inspection methods now provide safety engineers with abundant data that can flag hazardous conditions such as the one in Tank G at the Longview plant. 

 

But all the instrumentation and safety manuals in the world will not prevent an accident if those in charge don't take the actions required to avert it.  And in this case, for whatever reason, action was not taken.

 

If the tank was the main source of white liquor for the whole plant, repairing it would probably have meant shutting down the entire facility.  Well-run plants schedule maintenance downtime into their operating calendar for just such repairs, but it is not known whether Nippon Dynawave had such a schedule or whether their policy was simply to run things until something major broke. 

The facility is over seventy years old, according to Wikipedia.  While age itself is not necessarily an indication of hazardous conditions, older plants can give rise to outmoded habits and customs that simply wouldn't be tolerated in newer facilities.  The pressure to keep a facility running at all costs is always present when a large investment is at stake, and it is management's job to see that this pressure is resisted to the extent of calling for periodic maintenance shutdowns to allow for repairs such as were needed on the tank that collapsed.

 

It's significant that the failure occurred under conditions of maximum stress when the tank was filled with more than the usual amount of white liquor.  This condition might not have occurred for months, but sooner or later something was going to give, and it was the unfortunate fate of the eleven workers who died to be there when it happened.

 

This accident is unusually simple in that only a couple of coincidental factors had to come together for it to happen:  dangerous wall thinning and an unusually heavy load on the tank.  It would also have been relatively simple to avoid:  take the tank out of service and repair it before it busts.  But for whatever reason, that was not done.

 

The firm operating the plant now faces months of losses from a shutdown following the accident and huge legal and regulatory problems as well.  It's an old lesson, but one that can never be repeated enough:  when something really dangerous is discovered in a facility, safety officials should have the power to do anything necessary up to and including calling for a plant-wide shutdown in order to address it.  A management structure that doesn't permit this is just as dangerous as having a wall of a tank full of lye that's way too thin.

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP report on the U. S. Chemical Board preliminary investigation at https://apnews.com/article/nippon-dynawave-longview-chemical-tank-rupture-washington-3da9aff673419848f5cc29e076baabeb and the Wikipedia article "2026 Longview, Washington paper mill chemical tank collapse."