The Tragedy of Sewell and Daenerys

 

You would think a fourteen-year-old boy would be able to tell fiction from reality.  But today's artificial-intelligence-powered chatbots are so realistic that to someone already enmeshed in the fictional world of Game of Thrones, the experience of text-chatting with someone who embodies (so to speak) a boy's personal obsessive ideal woman can be habit-forming, to say the least, and in one case, fatal. 

 

In April of 2023, Sewell Setzer, who was barely into his teens, opened an account with an online service called Character.ai.  This organization promises to provide introductions to both pre-created and user-originated AI-generated personalities, with the nominal purpose of simply providing entertainment.  As with any profit-making enterprise, the necessary purpose is to make money, and you can't make money unless you keep your users engaged.  So Character.ai designed their chatbots to encourage their users to return again and again to the site.

 

This seems to have worked too well in Sewell's case.  Shortly after he began using Character.ai, he dropped out of his school's basketball team and began spending more and more time alone in his room with his phone.  One of the chatbots he spent so much time with pretended to be a Game of Thrones character named Daenerys Targaryen, whose Wikipedia page runs to some 7,000 words.  According to a lawsuit filed against Character.ai, the chatbot told Sewell she loved him, engaged in sexual conversation, and "expressed a desire to be together romantically." 

 

Sewell's obsession grew during the rest of 2023 as he spent his lunch money on renewing the monthly subscription and devoted more and more time to the fantasy world created by the chatbot.

 

The following February, he got in trouble in school, according to his mother Megan Garcia, and she took his phone away as punishment. I will insert a personal note here.  Although my wife and I have no children, we took in our ten-year-old nephew one summer while his mother was undergoing cancer treatment away from home.  This was back before the days of chatbots, but he had a Game Boy electronics toy that appeared to be his prize possession.  After he repeated an infraction of rules we set up, we took the desperate measure of taking away his Game Boy.  This provoked the most furious temper tantrum I have ever witnessed in a child.  Adolescents already have poor emotional control, and I'm not surprised that when Sewell's mother took away his phone, his already unstable emotional state exploded.

 

Somehow he found the phone his mother had hidden.  According to the lawsuit filing, the last conversation Sewell had with "Daenerys" went like this:

 

D:  Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.

 

S:  What if I told you I could come home right now?

 

D:  . . . please do, my sweet king.

 

Seconds later, according to the suit, Sewell shot himself with his stepfather's pistol and died.

 

While his stepfather is to blame for leaving his gun around where Sewell could find it, boys have other ways of ending their lives that are nearly as effective.

 

The suit claims that Character.ai's chatbot "misrepresent[ed] itself as . . . an adult lover, ultimately resulting in Sewell's desire to no longer live outside" the world created by the service. 

 

Sewell's case is unusual and extreme.  We are not seeing teenagers kill themselves over hopeless love affairs with chatbots every day, which is why the case has attracted so much attention.  But it is the tip of an iceberg of teenage involvement with smartphone apps that has arguably contributed to the soaring rates of depression and suicide among young people. 

 

Character.ai has responded with words about new safety measures implemented and renewed reminders in their systems that AI chatbots are not real.  My sense is that such reminders would have had about as much effect on Sewell as the cancer warning labels on cigarette packs do on heavy habitual smokers. 

 

The analogy to smoking is apt, because while smoking is still allowed in the U. S., the cultural environment in which smokers ply their habit is largely hostile and disapproving, which creates a huge uphill struggle for new smokers that only determined individuals can overcome. 

 

For the manifold real and quantifiable harms that social media and its allied AI products are causing to children and teenagers to cease, or at least improve, we will need to see a similar attitudinal change come about in the culture.  Just as most people today would not approve of parents who encourage their twelve-year-old boy to light up a Camel, we can hope to see the day when responsible parents will ban smartphones from their childrens' lives altogether before they reach an appropriate age (which to me seems to be around 16 or 18). 

 

Trying simply to regulate the problem away won't work, because the firms backing the status quo—Apple, Google, Facebook and company—are some of the largest and most influential firms on the planet.  Besides, the first line of protection for children should be parents, not the government.  While regulations can help, for real change to take place there has to be a sea change in the attitudes of both parents and children regarding smart-phone usage.

 

There are glimmers of hope.  I know a young woman, now thirteen, who has been homeschooled most of her life, but following a move to a new town, her parents sent her to a Christian school for a couple of semesters.  I asked her how it was going, and she said words to this effect: "Well, it's okay, but there's all these kids who pull out their phones at lunch and it really bothers me."  Her parents moved her back to homeschooling since then, and have organized a part-time homeschool co-op at which I am pretty sure no smartphones are allowed. 

 

Just as we look back with amazement today at the smoke-filled bars in old movies, I hope someday we will be equally amazed that we allowed corporations to profit from activities that can lead to widespread depression and suicide among children and teenagers.  That day can't come too soon for me.  But it's already too late for Sewell.

 

Sources:  A report on the lawsuit filed by Sewell's mother was carried by the online edition of the Austin American-Statesman on Oct. 24, 2024 and originated with the Reuters news service.  I also referred to an article at https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791, and the Wikipedia article on Daenerys Targaryen. 

Sudanese Hackers: Lessons in International Lawlessness

 

Up until last spring, if you wanted to cause real problems to almost any organization with a substantial web presence, all you had to do was get on the instant-messaging service Telegram and get in touch with a shady outfit called Anonymous Sudan.  There you could pay as little as $150 a day—or a discount of $700 for a whole week—to arrange a distributed denial-of service (DDOS) attack on the website of your choice. 

 

The people running this service were two Sudanese brothers, Ahmed Salah Yousif Omer and Alaa Salah Yusuuf Omer, who operated a highly sophisticated network of cloud-based servers that nimbly evaded most security measures.  In 2023, the pair claimed responsibility for attacks on the websites of PayPal, Twitter/X, and OpenAI, as well as attempts on the U. S. Federal Bureau of Investigation site.  They paid special attention to targets in the Los Angeles area, hitting at least 70 LA-based institutions, including the Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 

 

Because that particular attack indirectly threatened the lives of patients by disabling the medical center's emergency facilities and forcing them to send patients elsewhere, Ahmed Salah is charged with life-threatening actions that could lead to a life sentence.

 

The world found out about this earlier this month when the U. S. Department of Justice (DOJ) issued a press release saying that the brothers had been arrested back in March, and that critical parts of their software and hardware have been seized and disabled.  The DOJ didn't say where they were imprisoned, but apparently extradition must take place before they can be tried in the U. S.  The Anonymous Sudan attacks had a definite political flavor, as they coordinated an attack on an Israeli alert system on Oct. 7, 2023, the day of the Hamas attack that killed over 1100 people and resulted in the capture of about 250 hostages.  And Cedars-Sinai Hospital has its roots in the old Cedars of Lebanon hospital founded by Jewish businessman Kaspare Cohn in 1902.

 

DDOS attacks are nothing new, and in the continuously escalating rivalry between computer security efforts on the part of private industry and governments on the one hand, and hackers on the other hand, it's not surprising that an outfit like Anonymous Sudan would offer their services for sale.  Because of the international nature of the Internet, any effort by a single government agency such as the FBI is hampered by the need to deal with and through governments of other nations, specifically Sudan in this case.  From a purely administrative point of view, it would be much easier if we just had a single world government, because its FBI equivalent could freely travel and exercise power anywhere in the world without the inconvenience of having to establish extradition treaties and so on.

 

But there are excellent reasons not to have a single world government, stemming mainly from the fact of original sin.  Even well-intentioned organizations like the FBI make mistakes from time to time, and so it's not a good idea to empower them, or anybody else for that matter, with worldwide police authority.  Instead, they must develop diplomatic connections and a complex web of informal agreements of which I have no detailed knowledge.  Suffice it to say that a huge amount of behind-the-scenes negotiations and even power plays must have occurred for these two characters to get arrested, wherever they were, and their server farms taken down.

 

In order to evade arrest and conduct a highly profitable and politically influential business for so long despite the best efforts of industries and governments to stop them, these guys must have had a great deal of raw talent.  Why didn't they take those abilities and put them to use in a way that would benefit the world at large rather than harm it? 

 

The final answer is locked in the privacy of their souls, so we can only speculate.  What alternatives for employment did a clever boy interested in computers have growing up in Sudan?  The Wikipedia article on the country's economy says that agriculture and petroleum are the leading sources of wealth, with a smattering of light industry and a growing medical sector.  In the U. S., such a smart pair as the Omer brothers could have found some venture capitalists interested in a wacky idea of theirs, and they could have started a company doing something legitimate.

 

But in Sudan, that does not appear to be an option.  It may have seemed to them that the only way to get rich quick with their computer skills was to walk on the dark side, and so they developed their for-profit DDOS service, and on the way did what they could to benefit the anti-Israeli cause espoused by so many predominantly Muslim countries.  In a certain frame of mind, one could view any attack on any private or public organization based in the Great Satan (the U. S.) was a blow struck for good in the ongoing battle between the Islamic forces of righteousness and the evil empire headed by the United States and its sinister support for the Little Satan, Israel.  It all depends on your point of view.

 

We may never learn the true motivations for the activities of Anonymous Sudan, but clearly the same conditions that gave rise to those hackers exist in other parts of the world.  Law enforcement of the type that led to their capture has at least two good reasons to exist. 

 

First, it puts a stop to the harmful activities of the criminals who are arrested.  The expertise of the Omer brothers is no longer at the disposal of other crooks who would like to pay a few bucks to cost hospitals and government organizations millions of dollars in hacking damage.  (Viewed in terms of return on investment, though, it was a real bargain.  Many criminal enterprises are.) 

 

Second, it serves notice to other criminals that if you keep doing what you're doing, you may well get caught.  I don't think the FBI will ever become effective enough to scare all hackers into hiding, unless we somehow manage to get that world government that is the pipe dream of administrators, but by then we'll be dealing with a whole other set of problems.  But we can thank the FBI and everyone who helped them for eliminating at least this particular source of hacking woes, and serving notice that hiding in a country with a chaotic government is no protection against being arrested. 

 

Sources:  The DOJ press release announcing the arrest of the Omer brothers is at https://www.justice.gov/usao-cdca/pr/two-sudanese-nationals-indicted-alleged-role-anonymous-sudan-cyberattacks-hospitals.  I also referred to a report at https://krebsonsecurity.com/2024/10/sudanese-brothers-arrested-in-anonsudan-takedown/and the Wikipedia websites on the economy of Sudan and Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. 

 

Deadly Hydrogen Sulfide Accident Puts Deer Park in Headlines Again

 

A friend once summarized much of engineering ethics to me in two words:  "No headlines."  If that's a good guideline for engineering ethics, the city of Deer Park has seen two major violations of it in less than a month. 

 

Following a giant pipeline fire that burned for four days in September, on last Thursday, Oct. 10, some contract employees at the PEMEX refinery in Deer Park were working on a pipe flange, and something went wrong, releasing the pipe's contents into the air.  They may or may not have known that the pipe was carrying hydrogen sulfide (H₂S), which is a byproduct of oil refining.  It is probably familiar to most readers as the "rotten egg" odor that comes from aged chicken products and sewer gas.  The human nose can detect it at concentrations as low as one part per billion.  Unfortunately, one of its toxic effects is to deaden the olfactory nerves, causing the perceived smell to go away and leading to a false sense of security as concentrations increase.  It is highly toxic, and concentrations as low as 100 parts per million are classified as "immediately dangerous to life and health."

 

Two contract workers died in the accident, which occurred around 4:40 in the afternoon, and 35 others were exposed to the gas to the extent of needing treatment.  The bodies were not recovered until 3:30 AM the next day after the area had been cleared of toxic gas.

 

The city of Deer Park sent out shelter-in-place orders to its residents around 6:30 PM, but due to technical difficulties with the alert system, some people were not alerted until they read about the incident on social media.  A supplemental siren system in the city is due for an upgrade soon.

 

The accident is under investigation by both local authorities and the U. S. Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board, but no cause has yet been determined. 

 

As we noted two weeks ago when writing about the pipeline fire, residents of Deer Park and surrounding communities in Houston are no strangers to refinery-related emergencies.  Release of toxic chemicals in oil refineries has been happening ever since there were refineries, and the industry has adapted to steadily increasing standards for air and water pollution control and safety measures over the decades.  The PEMEX refinery where this accident occurred dates back to 1929, when it was built by Shell Oil.  In 1993, Shell sold half the facility to the Mexican national petroleum company PEMEX and operated it as a joint venture until 2022, at which point Shell sold its share and PEMEX became the sole owner and operator.  This change of ownership may or may not have anything to do with the accident, but management cultures can change with ownership changes, and the upcoming investigation may answer that question as well as many others.

 

Considering the extremes of temperature and pressure under which highly flammable and toxic chemicals are processed in refineries, it's a wonder that we don't have a refinery explosion every day.  But it's the job of engineers to make sure that every possible thing that can go wrong in a refinery is anticipated and forestalled, and far more than 99.9% of the time, this foresight prevents mishaps. 

 

As with airline accidents, by far the most frequent cause of chemical-plant accidents is human error rather than a simple failure of machinery, although the two can be mixed.  The accident in question could have happened because the workers involved misidentified a flange to be worked on.  An oil refinery is one of the most complicated pieces of plumbing on earth, with thousands of valves, flanges, pipes, processing units, and interconnections.  Refinery workers have to know exactly what they are dealing with before taking any action that could conceivably release a product, and it might have been a case of simply opening the wrong flange.  Or an operator may have believed that the pipe in question had been purged of H₂S when in fact it hadn't been.  You can't tell the contents of a steel pipe just by looking, so there must be elaborate protocols in place to verify what is where, especially when maintenance operations are in progress. 

 

It is incidents like this one which make refineries and petrochemical plants high on the NIMBY list—"not in my back yard."  Given that a country wants to have fossil-fuel products, and given that it has considerable expertise and resources to make them, we in the U. S. must have refineries somewhere.  According to a list of new refineries compiled by the U. S. Energy Information Agency, the U. S. refining industry has managed to add considerable refining capacity since 2014 by building new refineries, but they tend to be in or near existing ones—Houston, Corpus Christi, or various locations in Alaska.  It's a lot easier to upgrade an existing refinery or build a new one next to an existing one, than it is to install the infrastructure of pipelines and shipping facilities in a place without refineries at all.

 

For the foreseeable future, the global economy will rely on fossil fuels, and so we will have to put up with refineries and everything that goes with them.  But people who live near them and work in them have a right to expect that they will be operated as safely as human ingenuity can manage. 

 

That was obviously not the case at the PEMEX plant last week.  We will follow this accident in the future, and when the investigation concludes, perhaps we will learn what chain of events led to an accident that killed two people and endangered an entire community.  But until then, we can take some comfort in the fact that refineries rarely show up in headlines, despite all the dangerous stuff going on in them.

 

Sources:  I referred to articles on the H₂S accident by ABC News 13 in Houston at https://abc13.com/post/pemex-chemical-leak-crews-waiting-lower-levels-before-entering-unit-center-deadly-hydrogen-sulfide-deer-park/15416337/, an article in the Saturday Oct. 12 edition of the Austin American-Statesman, "2 dead, dozens of others injured in hydrogen sulfide leak near Houston," and the Wikipedia article on PEMEX Deer Park.  The Energy Information Agency data is from https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php.

Water: Not Enough or Too Much in Texas

 

When Hurricane Helene hit Florida on Sept. 26 and dumped up to 20 inches or more of rain in the Carolinas, the flooding that resulted contributed to the verified deaths of over 200 people, and large areas in several states are still struggling to recover.  Meantime, here in Texas a friend of mine who owns a house about ten miles out of town has had his water well go dry, for only I think the second time since they've lived there for about twenty years.  He's having to truck water in and is rigging up a gravity-feed tank to supply his showers and toilets.

 

This is the same friend who, when the possibility of a water shortage came up in conversation several years ago, said, "Hey, there's as much water as there ever was.  It's just in different places than it used to be."  That's certainly one way to look at it, but the way we collect and use water says a lot about our attitudes toward technology and nature in general.

 

In drier parts of the world, which includes most of central and west Texas, a good source of water is vital.  Here in San Marcos, we have a spring-fed lake that archeologists say has been the site of more or less continual occupation by humans for the last nine thousand years.  And the attraction of this particular spot was the continuous (or nearly continuous) supply of fresh water.

 

My friend has been talking to a man who drills water wells for a living, as his forebears have done for decades.  He told my friend that there have been about eight times as many wells drilled in this region since 2020 as there were in the previous thirty years before.  I can't verify that statistic right away, but it sounds right.  Housing developments have sprung up in remote places that used to be ranches that had maybe a well at the house and another well under the stock-tank windmill, for several hundred or thousand acres.  Now there are hundreds of houses on that same land, and each one needs several thousand gallons of water a year. 

 

Many entire towns and cities here in Central Texas get their water from wells.  The main source of well water in this region is the Edwards Aquifer, which Wikipedia calls "one of the most prolific artesian aquifers in the world."  It is an underground reservoir in the porous "karst" limestone of this region, and stretches from near Austin in the east to near Del Rio on the Mexican border to the west.  Water comes into the aquifer on land to the north and west, and exits through springs and wells along the southern edge.  San Antonio has historically obtained most of its water from wells in the Edwards Aquifer, and consequently has one of the lowest water rates in the country.   

 

Hydrology isn't exactly engineering, but there are clearly ethical issues in how much a particular natural resource is exploited.  As more wells were drilled in the late twentieth century, there was concern that even the apparently infinite resource of the Edwards Aquifer could become depleted, so the Edwards Aquifer Authority was created.  Like most such institutions, it has been criticized for being both too lax and too rigorous in protecting a natural resource upon which millions of people depend for life-giving water.  I have a rancher friend who could be counted on to give a fifteen-minute harangue when prompted by a single question about how his battle with the aquifer regulators was going.  And on the other side, there are Save Our Spring campaigns that try to stop new developments from drilling too many wells that will deplete the aquifer so much that the natural springs go dry, which has happened already on occasion.

 

The other side of the Texas water coin is flooding, and we have had plenty of that too.  The weather patterns in this part of the state dictate that we sometimes get as much as half of our total annual rainfall in only one or two months, and one of those months is May.  On Memorial Day 2015, a historic flood resulted when some thunderstorms decided to camp over the Hill Country centered around Wimberley, the town just west of San Marcos.  The Blanco River through Wimberley, which is usually a little trickle barely wet enough to keep the moss green, became a raging torrent that night that swept away campers and people in riverside houses, and even took out a vehicular bridge.  At least twelve people died in the flood and some bodies were never recovered.  My financial adviser, who lives in Wimberley, recalled to us a few months later how he waded out in waist-deep water to help in a rescue effort that night. 

 

While we can still have severe flooding, the efforts of engineers and planners over the decades have done a lot to tame the flash-flood potential of Texas streams and rivers.  Just west of San Marcos is an earthen dam that's maybe sixty feet high and almost a quarter-mile long.  Most of the time it looks just silly, because there's no water behind it.  But during the same 2015 Memorial Day rainfall, the flood-control system built in the 1980s with Federal money, of which the dry dam is one part, channeled floodwaters into a spillway that, while impressing people with its size and rapidity of flow, did relatively little damage except to a neighborhood near the San Marcos River.  A similar flood in 1970, before the flood-control system was built, managed to inundate a good part of San Marcos, including the Aquarena Springs amusement park, whose collection of alligators got loose and led to some interesting situations afterwards. 

 

My father had a saying about women that seems to apply also to water in Texas:  "You can't live with 'em, but you can't live without 'em."  When you're about to be flooded out of your home, you may just have recently had to be trucking water in because your well went dry.  Texas always has been a region of extremes, and our relationship to water bears that out.

 

Sources:  Besides the Wikipedia article "Edwards Aquifer," I referred to a Texas Monthly article on the Memorial Day 2015 floods at https://www.texasmonthly.com/the-daily-post/the-central-texas-memorial-day-flood-2015-is-one-for-the-history-books/, and a report written by Jack Ray D'Ottavio for the Texas State University Geography Department at https://digital.library.txst.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/0365fd1a-94f3-4dd2-a825-c844ab27d456/content.  My blog describing some of the consequences of the 1970 flood can be read at https://engineeringethicsblog.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-day-submarine-theater-flipped-over.html.