How Artificial Is the Artificial State?

 

In this week's New Yorker, Harvard historian and author Jill Lepore writes about something she calls "the artificial state," and takes a pretty dark view of it.  In light of last week's election, it's worthwhile to consider her criticisms, and ask how seriously democracy has been compromised by the automation of politics and elections.

 

Several paragraphs in, she gets around to defining the artificial state:  ". . . a digital-communications infrastructure used by political strategists and private corporations to organize and automate political discourse."  Before you can say something is wrong, you have to have a standard by which to judge rightness.  It's not entirely clear to me what Lepore has in mind as the ideal of democracy unencumbered by digital meddling.  Perhaps the closest she comes to posing an ideal or legitimate use is when she wishes these technologies could be reinvented as "well-regulated, public-interested digital utilities."  So one of the things that bothers her the most about the way politicians use digital technology these days is that it is largely unregulated, and instead of being directed to the public interest, it is controlled by private corporations or entities.

 

Another positive development she would like to see is the recognition of what one philosopher calls "epistemic rights."  Epistemology is the science of knowing, so epistemic rights are the right to be either known or unknown—another way of expressing the right to privacy, perhaps.  She also cites a British author and member of the Labour Party Josh Simons, who has written a book advocating the A. I. Equality Act, which would "assert political equality as a guiding principle in the design and deployment of predictive tools."

 

Turning to problems, she points out that after Elon Musk took over the former Twitter (now X) in 2022, the number of accounts on Twitter that are bots (i. e. not real people but digital simulacra commanded by a central authority) is between 11% (according to X) and 66% (according to an independent study).  That's not a real solid statistic to base a criticism on, but most people will agree that there is some measure of chicanery going on in the social-media world, where the origin of any given click-bait comment is essentially impossible to determine, and being skeptical about whether it came from a person or a machine is just common prudence.

 

There is no doubt in my mind that a good part of the blame for today's hyper-polarized politics is assignable to the drive to extremes that Lepore cites, a drive that is based not on high-minded aspirations for the good of democracy, but on profits.  That being said, profits are necessary for private companies to function.  The opposite alternative is for the government to own and run and regulate everything, which would certainly take care of the well-regulated part of Lepore's ideal digital democracy. 

 

But whether a government-run cyberspace would be public-interested is not clear.  Left to themselves, government-run organizations tend to become government-interested rather than public-minded.  One recent example is the way that the U. S. Department of Education did a face-plant with its attempt to follow Congress's instructions to simplify the Free Application for Federal Student Aid website and system.  The resulting dumpster-fire disaster had universities all over the country pushing back their application deadlines and losing millions of dollars of student financial aid, a mess which I understand is ongoing to this day.  With the election of Donald Trump, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona is packing his desk and checking his retirement plans.  If Cardona's work is an example of how government can operate digital systems in the public interest, good luck with getting it to run politically-oriented social media.

 

If the Department of Education depended for its operating revenue on having a smoothly-working website, with a real downside consequence if it wasn't, either we'd have a smoothly-working website or in a short while we wouldn't have a Department of Education at all.  And the latter outcome would be just fine with certain parties shortly to occupy the executive branch of government. 

 

Despite all the bots, the Musks running X and Bezoses running Facebook, and every other problem Lepore cites, and despite the fears of armed attacks on polling sites, the election we just experienced last week took place peacefully and issued in an outcome that was not desired by the majority of experts and would-be regulators that Lepore would put in charge of our digital political system.  And I'm sure that she would say, "See what happened?  Democracy failed!  All these young black and Hispanic men are voting against their self-interest because they've been bamboozled by the system."

 

Now some people are easily bamboozled, but a principle of democracy that Lepore didn't mention in her article is that if a person meets the minimal legal requirements to vote (age and citizenship, primarily), he or she is free to vote any durn way they please.  That principle assigns any responsibility for avoiding bamboozlement to the individual, not to any government agency in charge of preventing voter bamboozling. 

 

I almost hate to say it, but Lepore shows that many people in the higher reaches of academia are more parochial (isolated in a small group of like-minded individuals) than most of the average Joes and Jills they criticize.  The problem of regulating political speech was stated well by the Roman poet Juvenal when he asked "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" meaning "Who watches the watchmen?"  Any such regulation inevitably introduces bias, and while there are certain incendiary types of speech that common sense says should be prohibited, the distortions of the present "artificial state," as Lepore puts it, are something that the average voter probably takes into account before voting.

 

I do agree with Lepore that digital technology has severely altered the way the democratic process works in this country.  But I think the answer is not less democracy and more autocratic control, but more democracy in the sense of grass-roots movements towards things like local bans on smartphones for people under 16 or so, and some kind of back-to-reality movement whose outlines are not clear at this time.  In the meantime, we can rejoice that most of the dire predictions about last week's elections didn't come true.  But of course, dire is in the eye of the beholder. 

 

Sources:  Jill Lepore's "The Artificial State" appeared on pp.69-71 of the Nov. 11, 2024 edition of The New Yorker.  I referred to the Wikipedia article "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?"

Can Space Be Hazardous To Your Health?

 

The short answer is, yes.

 

When International Space Station (ISS) crew members Matthew Dominick, Michael Barratt, Jeanette Epps, and Alexander Grebenkin returned from a 235-day mission on Friday, October 25, NASA officials decided to hospitalize them all in a Pensacola facility.  One astronaut (not named for privacy reasons) stayed overnight, while the others were treated and released sooner, and they were all reunited the following day for what was called "normal post-flight reconditioning." 

 

Because this item made the news, we can assume that hospitalizing ISS astronauts right after landing is not normal.  And whatever the issues were, they were resolved fairly quickly.  But this incident brings up a larger question:  will humans ever be able to live "normal" lives in space for missions lasting years or even lifetimes?

 

A study published in Nature Communications last June shows that astronauts' kidneys may be a weak link in the plans to send humans on long space flights or residences in space.  It has been known for some time that astronauts who spend weeks or months in space are especially prone to develop kidney stones.  Anyone who has experienced the agonizing pain of this condition realizes that it's one of the last medical problems you want to encounter in a place where going down the street to the hospital is just not an option.  If the stone is large enough, anuresis (inability to pee) can develop, leading to a fatal case of uremic poisoning.

 

If I had to guess (and bloggers exercise that privilege all the time), I would say that the brief hospital stays may have been kidney-related, although it could also have been balance issues or other effects of long-term residence in space.  In space, kidney stones have no preferred location to drift to, but once you are standing upright on the ground, they will tend to head toward the exit, so to speak, which is just where you don't want them to go.  A well-equipped hospital can use lithotripsy (non-invasive technology to break up kidney stones) or endoscopic methods to clear the obstruction.  The procedure is uncomfortable but usually has a good outcome.  However, I doubt that the ISS is equipped for such procedures.

 

Even if kidney stones can be prevented, the Nature study showed that both microgravity and the galactic cosmic radiation that can't be practically shielded from in space can damage kidney function in other ways.  In the words of Dr. Keith Siew, one author of the study, "If we don't develop new ways to protect the kidneys, I'd say that while an astronaut could make it to Mars they might need dialysis on the way back."  Not an encouraging prospect.

 

The study showed that microscopic changes occur in the kidney tubules that do the filtering so necessary to the body's proper functioning.  It's not clear how much damage is due to radiation and how much to microgravity, but both are present in space and neither can be avoided. 

 

Anything worth doing involves challenges, and the problems of kidneys in space is only one of the manifold issues that astronauts face, up to and including sudden death in a collision with a meteorite.  And with proper planning, it's likely that this specific health issue will yield to either pharmaceutical treatment or some other workaround to enable astronauts to spend the several years in space needed to get to Mars, which seems to be the next goal of the humans-in-space race.

 

But it's possible that something like the old 2001:  A Space Odyssey suspended-animation process might come back if we can't find a way to keep a fully functioning human body going in the harsh environment of space. 

 

That doesn't matter to some people.  In 2013, an outfit called Mars One started selling one-way tickets to the Red Planet, and a surprising number of people signed up and paid the nominal reservation fee.  Apparently, there were enough folks here on Earth who saw getting away from it all as far as possible was a better option than what they were doing.  Mars One went bankrupt in 2019, so I suppose those one-way tickets may show up now and then on eBay, but otherwise won't do anybody any good. 

 

The point of that story is that some people would, in principle, take any risk in order to do a historic thing like land on Mars.  But these folks are clearly in the minority. 

 

There is a body of thought out there that our species' ultimate destiny is to migrate to other planets and basically keep doing what the Europeans did in the Age of Exploration:  find and exploit new uninhabited places to live.  And it's always a bad idea to underestimate the ingenuity of humankind.  Perhaps with some yet-uninvented technology and bio-modification of the human body, we could fix it so that millions of—somethings—could live on Mars.  I say "somethings" because if you modify the human form so that it can live on Mars, would these beings be capable of moving back to Earth?  Would they be permanent Martians rather that Earthlings?  It's hard to say.

 

The reader may be able to tell that I recently read a copy of Ray Bradbury's story collection The Illustrated Man.  Bradbury was not the least bit interested in the actual nuts and bolts of how to get to Mars.  I've even read one critic who said Bradbury "hated" technology, but I think that's an exaggeration.  What Bradbury used the trope of space travel for was to examine human relations—questions of racial discrimination, government, politics, and love.  And he probably did that better than any other science-fiction writer of his day.

 

He also realized that no matter how far humanity travels, we will carry the same old baggage of what the theologians call original sin with us.  And if people think that we could solve all our cultural and political problems simply by starting over on Mars or some yet-to-be-found planet, instead of spending billions on preventing kidney problems in future astronaut populations, they should read The Illustrated Man and realize that whatever problems space travel will fix, original sin isn't one of them.

 

Sources:  I referred to news items on the ISS astronauts' hospitalizations at https://apnews.com/article/nasa-astronauts-spacex-splashdown-f99e1724b4c131e68e0cf8c30274fc11, https://nypost.com/2024/11/02/us-news/nasa-spacex-must-maintain-focus-after-astronauts-hospitalized-safety-panel-says/, and https://nypost.com/2024/10/26/us-news/nasa-astronaut-remains-in-the-hospital-after-returning-from-an-extended-stay-in-space/.  A University College London article describing the Nature Communications study is at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/2024/jun/would-astronauts-kidneys-survive-roundtrip-mars, and the Nature article is at https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-49212-1.  The news of Mars One's bankruptcy is at https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/11/18220153/mars-one-bankruptcy-bas-lansdorp-human-settlement.