Attention Must Be Paid—But To Whom?

 

In Arthur Miller's famous play "Death of a Salesman," the salesman Willy Loman's wife Linda cries out at the climax, "Attention, attention must be paid to such a person."  If we love someone, we honor them with attention, which is something only a conscious being can pay.  In a recent issue of The New Yorker, Daniel Immerwahr takes a look at current concerns that our attention spans are growing shorter because of social media and smartphones. 

 

Some academics see the crisis as real.  Immerwahr quotes theologian Adam Kotsko, who teaches at a small liberal-arts college, as saying ". . . in the past five years, it's as though someone flipped a switch . . . . Students are intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding."  On the other hand, media that use modes other than just text are getting longer.  Immerwahr notes that one of the most award-winning films of 2024, "The Brutalist," runs well over three hours.  And a highly popular video game called "Baldur's Gate 3" takes a dedicated player about seventy-five hours to play.

 

As Immerwahr points out, every new medium from the printed novel to radio and television gave rise to similar concerns that people will no longer be able to pay adequate attention to things they should attend to.  Interactive media such as TikTok, Facebook, and the like have added a new factor:  the carefully-honed algorithms that profile user preferences and give them more of what they like.  That is how you can pick up your smartphone to check the weather forecast, finally shake yourself forty-five minutes later and ask, "What have I been doing?" and not be able to come up with a satisfactory answer.

 

Overall, though, Immerwahr concludes that if attention spans are in trouble—a concept he says even psychologists can't satisfactorily define—we are still able to devote long unbroken spans of time to things that we are interested in, or things that attract us.  At the end of his essay, he concludes that the real problem is not so much that we can't pay attention, but that what we pay attention to is often overhyped, inflammatory, divisive, or false. 

 

Rod Dreher couldn't agree more.  In his new book Living in Wonder:  Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, Dreher calls for a recognition that modern societies have adopted a set of undebated underlying assumptions about the world that derive from the fact that we are, in a pungent phrase, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic—conveniently abbreviated WEIRD.  This combination of background factors is highly unusual in world history, and has led us into a materialistic, scientistic worldview that excludes the supernatural from practical consideration.  That, Dreher points out, is a real problem, because the world simply isn't that way.

 

Attention is a kind of love.  One cannot love something, or someone, to whom one pays no attention.  Dreher makes no secret of the fact that he is a capital-O Orthodox Christian.  The Orthodox family of churches sat out the Reformation, and preserve an unbroken tradition of acknowledging the supernatural in worship and theology that goes back all the way to the time of Christ.  His book is full of stories of dreams, visions, apparently coincidental meetings, and similar phenomena that support his contention of God, and demons too, being all around us. 

 

His chapter most relevant to our topic is "Aliens and the Sacred Machine."  In search of meaning, we will pay attention to all sorts of things that don't necessarily fit into the materialist worldview.  With the advent of artificial-intelligence companions (AI girlfriends, for example), some men find that they are more comfortable talking to a machine, or even doing other things with it, than with going through the effort to meet and get to know a real woman. 

 

But that isn't all.  According to Diana Pasulka, a professor of religious studies at University of North Carolina Wilmington, many influential people think that AI reveals "nonhuman intelligence from outside our dimension of space-time."  In other words, the "I" that software like ChatGPT uses isn't just a function of the program—there's a non-material personality at work in there somewhere.  And according to Dreher, if it's not God, it's from the other place—in other words, demonic.

 

Reading this section of Dreher's book reminded me powerfully of C. S. Lewis's 1945 science-fiction dystopia That Hideous Strength.  In that book—which has a sketchy outline of what is recognizably the Internet, 45 years before its advent—scientists manage to revive the decapitated head of an evil genius so it serves as a medium of communication between them and certain forces which turn out to be demonic.  Their regard for what they call the Head can only be described as worship, and when people cease to believe in God, they will end up worshiping either themselves or something outside themselves that eventually enslaves them. 

 

When the first caveman painted the first cave painting, he was probably tempted to sit and admire his work instead of paying attention to his fellow cave-dwellers, so in a sense, the problem of distracted attention has always been with us.  But not until recently has it been super-powered by AI algorithms that insidiously lead us away from God and the human beings who deserve our attention, and into the rabbit-holes and dungeons of distraction that wastes the only thing all of us have the same amount of every day—time. 

 

Dreher relates how he was rescued from a near-suicidal focus on his own misery by the ancient practice of reciting the Jesus Prayer, five hundred times a day.  This forced his attention away from himself and his distractions, and while he still has plenty of problems, he was able to get moving again and write a remarkable book. 

 

Those of us who grew up in a less distraction-prone age—the 1960s, say—have no idea what younger people struggle against in trying to pay attention to those objects and people which they know deserve it.  If you believe in such things, say a prayer for them as we face the assaults of AI-powered social media, and be aware that, as Dreher begins his book, "The world is not what we think it is."

 

Sources:  The article, "Check This Out" by Daniel Immerwahr appears on pp. 64-69 of the Jan. 27, 2025 issue of The New Yorker.  Rod Dreher's Living in Wonder was published in 2024 by Zondervan.  C. S. Lewis's That Hideous Strength is available in numerous editions.  And a description and explanation of the Jesus Prayer is at https://www.oca.org/orthodoxy/the-orthodox-faith/spirituality/prayer-fasting-and-almsgiving/the-jesus-prayer.

Did IBM Help with the Holocaust?

 

Edwin Black certainly thinks it did.  In 2001, he published the fruit of years of research he and dozens of volunteers conducted into the history of the International Business Machines Corporation and how its German offspring, called Dehomag, participated in Nazi Germany's highly organized wartime actions, including the execution of six million Jews and other "undesirables."  The resulting 520-page book, IBM and the Holocaust, has to be one of the most excruciatingly detailed and exhaustively researched books on any technical aspect of World War II.  But if you frame the issue in terms of a legal case, the book is more like an extensive set of notes for the prosecution, rather than the prosecution itself. 

 

To say anything meaningful about the book in the space of one column is presumptuous, but I'll try anyway.  Black provides useful context by briefly describing the corporate history of IBM, which formally begins in 1911 with the founding of the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company.  One of the founders was the German-American inventor Herman Hollerith, whose concept of storing information in the form of little holes in thin stiff cards gave rise to what we would now call the first data-processing machines.  Salesman Thomas J. Watson, who eventually rose to head the company, expanded IBM's customer base beyond the U. S. government, which used "Hollerith cards" as long ago as the 1890 census, and by 1930 Watson was in firm control of what was now known as International Business Machines, or IBM.  Almost in parallel, a German subsidiary whose full name was Deutsche Hollerith-Maschinen GmbH (abbreviated "Dehomag") was established and provided punch-card equipment to Germany and other European customers.  Dehomag was owned 90% by IBM USA, which wasn't a problem until Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in 1933 and the U. S. public perception of what became the Nazi regime turned sour.

 

Author Black accumulated tens of thousands of documents showing exactly how Watson and IBM USA kept Dehomag going throughout World War II, despite its being taken over by Nazi-appointed trustees once the war began.  Profits, which were substantial, built up in frozen accounts which were accessed after the war, and Black shows how IBM-designed and provided punch cards and processing systems allowed the Nazis to count, locate, and round up Jews and other disparaged types when the time came for the concentration camps to ramp up their killings. 

 

From the earliest IBM-facilitated census in 1933 to the last gasp of the Nazi regime in 1945, punch-card systems helped Germany keep track of trains, coordinate production, and account for every death in every concentration camp.  A secret government agency founded in 1937 and called the Maschinelles Berichtwesen (Office of Automated Reporting) kept track of punch-card equipment and supplies, and served as a central clearinghouse for all punch-card technology and operations, which consumed many millions of cards during the war.  And as Black shows, the U. S. minders at IBM kept tabs on Dehomag and other European subsidiaries all the way through the war, sometimes even with the assistance of U. S. diplomatic personnel.

 

That sounds bad enough.  But what is missing in Black's otherwise unimpeachable thoroughness of documentation is any consideration of alternatives, and a kind of moral summing up of exactly what IBM's culpability was.  His book is a classic case of not being able to see, or at least talk about, the forest because of all the trees in the way.  In the introduction, Black admonishes the reader to read the book all the way through, or not at all.  I did what he told me to, but this meant slogging through page after page of minutiae such as examples of bills of sale and machine serial numbers. 

 

Perhaps Black thought his job was simply to report the facts and let the facts speak for themselves.  But facts never do—historians have to say something about what they mean.  And what I kept wishing for was an examination of what Watson (who in a real sense was IBM at the time) could have done differently, and whether it would have made any difference.

 

For example, suppose Watson had simply sold Dehomag at a huge discount to whatever buyers in Germany were around in 1939, say, and walked away from the subsidiary, cutting off all communication with it.  One could argue that this would have been a dereliction of responsibility to IBM's shareholders, as Dehomag was using IBM's technology and patents.  But perhaps it would have been worth it for the war effort.  As it turns out, Dehomag probably had enough expertise to keep going without the parent company's help, but perhaps with less effectiveness.  The Nazis were not about to let go of the informational power that punch-card systems gave them, and the Maschinelles Berichtwesen would have kept the machines running somehow. 

 

As it happened, Watson tried to walk a fine line between not appearing to favor the Nazi regime on the one hand, and not abandoning Dehomag altogether on the other hand.  In 1937 Hitler awarded Watson the Merit Cross of the German Eagle with Star, but in June of 1940, Watson publicly returned the medal, and nearly lost Dehomag in the process.  But intense diplomatic and other efforts kept Dehomag in IBM's orbit, however tenuously.

 

If punch cards had never been invented, Hitler would probably have killed a lot of Jews in World War II anyway, but maybe not as efficiently and thoroughly.  One frustrating aspect of Black's book is that he clearly has only a layman's understanding of exactly how IBM's 1930s punch-card technology operated.  He shows how the Nazis valued and used the technology and how much faster it allowed them to find Jews and track railroad cars, but comparisons between operations carried out with punched cards and modern-day computing are lacking. 

 

Nevertheless, Black has shown that IBM's machines were an essential part of the Nazi war machine, and that Watson and his underlings did nothing to slow down their use—in fact, they assisted to the extent possible, always refraining from asking exactly what the Nazis were doing with their cards. 

 

The IBM of today is a vastly different entity than it was in the 1930s, but the sordid record of its collusion with Nazi Germany is a moral lesson in the responsibilities of corporations in wartime.  Black has given us plenty of material from which to draw that lesson, but the job of learning it is up to us.

 

Sources:  Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust:  The Strategic Allliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation was published by Crown (a division of Random House) in 2001.

Tesla Smart Summon App May Not Be

. . . all that smart, that is.

 

Say you're a well-off single twenty-something guy with a brand-new Tesla and you read the following on your car's control screen:

 

"Buckle up for the ride of your life, except, surprise!  You're not in the car.  ASS (Actually Smart Summon) allows your vehicle to come to you, or head to a spot that you choose, all on its own.  It's like magic, but with more tech and less wand-waving."

 

What's not to like?  Imagine leaving a bar with your date and saying, "Watch this," and pressing the ASS button—on the phone, that is.  And your new Tesla just quietly leaves its space in the parking lot and pulls up next to you.  How cool is that?

 

And how likely are you to follow the fine print on the instruction screen to the letter, which reads in part "Keep an eye on your car and its surroundings at all times.  Stay vigilant, especially around the fast and the furious (people, bikes, and other cars)."  No, you're more likely to be lapping up the adulation from your date. 

 

So when the U. S. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) received a complaint about a crash involving a Tesla under Actually Smart Summon control, it started looking around and found several other similar incidents in media reports, a total of twelve malfunctions that it is currently investigating.

 

Part of the problem is that the NHTSA has told Tesla to report directly to them any crashes on "publicly accessible roads" that involve autonomous operation of its vehicles.  The Summon software has an internal interlock that prevents it being used on public streets, and it's intended only for parking lots and driveways.  This leads to a debate about what "publicly accessible" means.  If you have a gate at the bottom of your driveway, it's not publicly accessible.  But what if there's no gate, or the gate is open?  I'd say most ungated parking lots for retail and commercial enterprises are publicly accessible.  It looks like Tesla hasn't been entirely forthcoming to the NHTSA, assuming in the first place that they knew about some of the incidents.  And considering how intimately the software of every Tesla is tied to corporate HQ, I suspect they had the data at their fingertips.

 

The Associated Press story about this latest kerfuffle between the NHTSA and Tesla reminds us that in the past, Elon Musk, Tesla's CEO, has complained that the regulatory agency is stifling progress in autonomous driving technology.  There is speculation that once the Trump administration is in charge of all executive-branch agencies such as the NHTSA, Musk, who donated heavily to Trump's campaign and was appointed to a government-improvement board, will pressure the NHTSA to lay off Tesla, in short. 

 

How much regulation is too much?  It depends on who you ask:  the companies that are regulated, or the people who benefit from regulations.

 

Just to pick a historical example, ask any member of the families of the so-called "radium girls" who spent eight hours a day in the 1920s painting radium dials on watches and clocks, came down with radiation poisoning, and died horrible deaths.  The use of radium was not regulated at all back then, and the radium girls paid the price. 

 

On the other hand, a classic case of "rent-seeking," which means a firm that uses government regulation to create a monopoly or other favorable business environment for itself, came about for most of the twentieth century in the U. S. when Ma Bell (American Telephone and Telegraph) regulated away virtually all other telecomm companies except for a few harmless local enterprises here and there.  In retrospect, this over-regulation stifled competition and slowed technological advance to a crawl until antitrust lawsuits broke up the monopoly and led to the explosion of telecomm services and smartphone apps that we (mostly) enjoy today. 

 

There are two extremes to think about.  The same AP article mentions that Tesla suffered its first decline in sales in a decade last year.  Could this be a sign that regulatory burdens are losing Tesla business?  I doubt it.  There are so many other factors involved—Chinese competition in electric vehicles, the continuing high prices of EVs compared to gasoline-powered cars, even political factors (I'm sure there are some people who will refuse to buy a Tesla simply because Musk hangs out with Trump)—that blaming a sales decline on regulatory pressure is implausible.

 

Musk has a well-earned reputation for playing fast and loose with bureaucracies and their spawn, namely regulations.  This attitude on the part of a radical innovator is understandable.  Technical innovation frequently gets ahead of the law, in that it creates situations that are unprecedented and nobody has had the time to figure out what laws to pass regarding them.  Musk seems to believe that it's easier to get forgiveness in retrospect than permission in advance, and there is some truth to that.

 

On the other hand, he also seems to think that telling people to be careful absolves him and his company of responsibility if a Tesla driver disobeys instructions.  Many crashes involving the "self-driving" features of Teslas have happened because, in direct contradiction to instructions telling drivers to keep their hands on the wheel and be prepared to take over if something unusual happens, the drivers have been doing things like watching videos on their phones. 

 

It's possible something similar is happening with the Summons features.  Besides the Actually Smart Summons, there is a Dumb Summons that lets you manually drive the car like a giant radio-controlled toy, and that obviously requires you to pay full attention to what you're doing and watch the four-camera display on your phone while you're doing it.  But the NHTSA is concerned about latency issues and how fast the car can go in this mode, as it looks like remote-control drivers may not have had enough time to avoid obstacles such as other parked cars and bollards (those traffic-preventing posts mounted in the ground).

 

My two cents on this is that the NHTSA is doing about right in not taking drastic action such as banning all Teslas from the road, but not ignoring new problems as they surface in complaints and media reports either.  The NHTSA will continue to spotlight problems with Teslas, and Musk will continue to gripe that they're overdoing it, and life will go on. 

 

And maybe the people making up acronyms at Tesla for the next new app will be a little more careful about what it spells.  I spent five minutes trying to think of how I could incorporate ASS in my headline, but finally took the high road and left it out.  Not everybody else will, though.

 

Sources:  An Associated Press article published on Jan. 7, 2025 entitled "US opens another Tesla probe, latest focused on tech that remotely returns car to driver," appeared at https://apnews.com/article/tesla-investigation-safety-autonomous-death-a158e4dee7b5e94b148ec3bb5c47233d.  I obtained the instruction quotes from a screenshot contained in a short video demonstrating the ASS app at https://www.youtube.com/shorts/RmVk-0LlDMI. 

Jeju Airlines Flight 2216: A Deadly Combination

On Sunday Dec. 29, the Boeing 737-800 carrying 181 people on Jeju Air Flight 2216 from Bangkok to the South Korean regional airport in Muan crashed, killing all but two flight attendants on board.  The circumstances of the crash are yet another example of how problems that may not be fatal individually can combine to create a major tragedy.

 

Following an apparently normal flight from Thailand, on the approach to Muan the pilot was warned of the presence of birds near the runway.  According to the Wikipedia article on the accident, during their approach the pilots issued a mayday, apparently due to a bird strike.  They were given permission to land in the opposite direction to their initial approach.

 

On the ground, residents reported hearing loud bangs before the plane landed, and smoke was seen coming from one engine, suggesting that birds may have disabled it.

 

For reasons yet unknown, the landing gear was not deployed before the pilot attempted a second pass at the runway.  The plane landed nose-up and skidded for 1200 meters on the engine nacelles.  A video made by a bystander shows the plane traveling toward the end of the runway, apparently intact and not on fire yet.

 

But 250 meters beyond the end of the runway, the plane encountered the concrete foundation of an instrument-landing-system antenna array.  The plane was going fast enough to destroy all of the fuselage except for a small section of the tail, in which the two survivors were found with serious injuries.  Everyone else—175 passengers and four crew members—died.

 

The damaged flight recorder was recovered and is being analyzed in the U. S. for clues as to why so many things went wrong at once.  But even at this early stage in the investigation process, a few things are clear.

 

A bird strike disabling one of the two engines of a 737 is not by itself a fatal occurrence.  If the other engine is operating normally, there is enough power and control remaining for a skilled pilot to land the craft and even take off with one engine, given enough runway distance.

 

A failure of landing gear to deploy, by itself, is also a survivable problem.  If ground crews have enough notice to spread foam on the runway and be prepared for a post-landing fire, planes have successfully landed (a "belly landing") without operating landing gear.  The feat is very tricky, however, and always damages the plane extensively, and any obstructions on the ground or past the end of the runway can destroy the plane.

 

And that is exactly what happened when the 737-800, which up to that point had survived the belly landing relatively intact, struck the concrete antenna-array foundation 250 meters beyond the end of the runway.  Aviation experts say that barrier should not have been allowed to be erected so close to the flight path.  It is an obvious undesirable feature of airport architecture to have a solid substantial structure that won't break away in the possible path of belly-landing aircraft.  Some South Korean architectural firm is going to have to answer some hard questions in the near future.

 

So we see that the accident involved at least three independent, although possibly related, problems:  the bird strike or whatever it was that apparently killed an engine, the failure of the landing gear to deploy (whether through mechanical failure or human error), and the placement of a potentially plane-destroying concrete obstruction in the flight path.  Eliminating any one of these issues could have resulted in a scary but survivable landing.  But all three of them combined to produce the most deadly aircraft accident on South Korean soil in that nation's history.

 

This accident comes at a supremely fragile point in the political history of South Korea, which is currently being run by an acting president after Yoon Suk Yeol, who was duly elected in May of 2022, declared martial law, was impeached on Dec. 14, 2024, and replaced by Han Duck-soo, who was impeached in turn on Dec. 27, and replaced by Choi Sang-mok.  A national tragedy such as the Jeju Air crash would be a blot on even a popular president's record, but coming at this time of instability, it will only add to the general level of tension and anxiety in the country.

 

Our sympathy extends to the hundreds of relatives, loved ones, and friends who lost passengers at this holiday time.  Until the flight recorder is examined, we can't know exactly what was going on in the cockpit during what was clearly an emergency.  And in the aftermath of such a tragedy, assigning blame is not going to bring anyone back from the dead, although it might give a sense of closure to some. 

 

South Korea is a fascinating case study of a culture which propelled itself from a rather backwards agriculture-based traditional model to one in which cutting-edge technology fuels a so-far thriving economy.  Curiously, though, South Korea has the world's lowest total fertility rate.  At 0.78, it is well below the replacement rate of about 2.1 (the average number of children born to a woman over her lifetime), and is already having a deleterious effect on the country's economy and social life.  Losing family members is always hard, but in a country where marriage and childbearing have become relatively unpopular, a tragedy like this one must make things seem even worse.

 

We look forward to the results of the investigation into this accident.  But already there are lessons to be learned about airport architecture, about emergency landing procedures, and about the damage birds can cause when they fly near airports, as birds are always going to do.  The year 2024 ended badly for air safety, with the apparent shooting down of Azerbaijan Airlines flight 8243 which we covered only last week, and now the Jeju Air crash.  Let's hope the lessons from both of these tragedies are learned quickly and applied to make air travel in 2025 even safer than ever.

 

Sources:  I referred to a Reuters article on the Jeju Air crash at https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/south-korea-extends-boeing-737-800-inspections-following-fatal-crash-2025-01-03/, a CBS News report at https://www.cbsnews.com/news/south-korea-plane-crash-police-raid-jeju-air/, and the Wikipedia article "Jeju Air Flight 2216."