"Winter's Tale" and the Spirit of Engineering

 

Once in a great while I will review a non-fiction book in this space that I think is worth paying attention to if one is interested in engineering ethics.  Winter's Tale by Mark Helprin is a novel, published in 1983, and even now I can't say exactly why I think it should be more widely known among engineers and those interested in engineering.  But it should be.

 

Every profession has a spirit: a bundle of intuitive and largely emotional feelings that go along with the objective knowledge and actions that constitute the profession.  Among many other things, Winter's Tale captures the spirit of engineering better than any other fiction work I know.  And for that reason alone, it deserves praise.

 

The book is hard to describe.  There are some incontestable facts about it, so I'll start with those.  It is set mainly in New York City, with excursions to an imaginary upstate region called Lake of the Coheeries, and side trips to San Francisco.  It is not a realistic novel, in the sense that some characters in it live longer than normal lifespans, and various other meta-realistic things happen.  There are more characters in it than you'd find in a typical nineteenth-century Russian novel.  There is no single plot, but instead a complex tapestry that dashes back and forth in time like a squirrel crossing a street. 

 

But all these matters are secondary.  The novel's chief virtue is the creation of an atmosphere of hope and, not optimism, exactly—some truly terrible things happen to people in it—but a temperate yet powerful energy and drive shared by nearly all the characters, except for a few completely evil ones.  And even the evil ones are interesting. 

 

The fertility of Helprin's imagination is astounding, as he creates technical terms, flora and fauna, and other things that are, strictly speaking, imaginary yet somehow make sense within the story.  One of the many recurring elements in the book is the appearance of a "cloud wall" which seems to be a kind of matrix of creation and time travel.  Here is how Virginia, one of the principal characters, describes it to her son Martin:

 

           ". . . It swirls around the city in uneven cusps, sometimes dropping down like a tornado to spirit people away or deposit them there, sometimes opening white roads from the city, and sometimes resting out at sea while connections are made with other places.  It is a benevolent storm, a place of refuge, the neutral flow in which we float.  We wonder if there is anything beyond it, and we think that perhaps there is."

           "Why?" Martin asked from within the covers.

            "Because," said Virginia, "in those rare times when all things coalesce to serve beauty, symmetry, and justice, it becomes the color of gold—warm and smiling, as if God were reminded of the perfection and complexity of what He had long ago set to spinning, and long ago forgotten."

 

The whole novel is like that.

 

Although there is no preaching, no doctrine expounded, and very few explicitly religious characters such as ordained ministers, a thread of holiness, or at least awareness of life beyond this one, runs throughout the book.  This is probably why I learned about it from a recommendation by the Catholic philosopher Peter Kreeft, who mentioned it in Doors in the Walls of the World.

 

The reason engineers might benefit from reading it is that machines and other engineered structures—steam engines, cranes, bridges, locomotives—and those who design, build, and tend them, are portrayed in a way that is both appealing and transcendent.  At this moment I feel a frustration stemming from my inability to express what is so attractive about this book. 

 

You may learn something from the fact that the reviews of it I could find fell into two camps.  One camp loved it and wished it would go on forever.  The other camp, of which I turned out to be a member, said that after a while they found the book annoying, and almost didn't finish it.  I think one reason for the latter reaction is that structurally, it is all trees and very little forest.

 

The very fertility of Helprin's imagination leads him to introduce novel and fascinating creations, incidents, and characters every page or two, and the result is a loss of coherence in the overall story and sequence of events.  A chart of every character and incident with lines drawn among them would look like the wiring diagram of a Boeing 747. 

 

But every time I said to myself that I was going to stop reading it, I picked it up again, and finally chose one free day to finish the thing, all the time hoping that it would get to the point.  There is no crashing finale in which everything is tied up neatly with a bow.  There is, however, a climax of sorts, and toward the end events occur which have parallels in the New Testament.  Farther than that I shouldn't go, for fear of spoiling the ending for anyone who wants to read it. 

 

The only other novel I can think of that bears even a faint resemblance to Winter's Tale is G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday.  It is also a fantasy in the sense that unrealistic things happen, and it features characters who are what Kreeft calls archetypes, embodied representations of ideas.  Not everyone likes or can even make sense of Chesterton's novel, and the same will undoubtedly be true of Winter's Tale.

 

For a fantasy, Helprin's book is rather earthy in spots, and for that reason I wouldn't recommend it for children.  But the earthiness is not gratuitous, and rounds out the realism of his character portrayals.  Many of the main actors behave courageously and even nobly, and would be good subjects for the exemplary mode of engineering ethics, in which one describes how engineering went right in a particular case with ethical implications. 

 

If you pick up the book, you will know in the first few pages whether you can stand to read the rest.  If you persist till the end, you will have experienced a world unlike our own in some ways, but very like what it could be if we heeded, in Lincoln's phrase, the better angels of our nature. 

 

Sources:  Winter's Tale was published in 1983 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.  Peter Kreeft's Doors in the Walls of the World was published in 2018 by Ignatius Press.

Should We Worry About Teens Befriending AI Companions?

A recent survey-based study by Common Sense Media shows that a substantial minority of teenagers surveyed use AI "companions" for social interaction and relationships.  In a survey of over a thousand young people aged 13 to 17 last April and May, the researchers found that 33% used applications such as ChatGPT, Character, or Replika for things like conversation, role-playing, emotional support, or just as a friend.  Another 43% of those surveyed used AI as a "tool or program," and about a third reported no use of AI at all.

 

Perhaps more troubling than the percentages were some comments made by teens who were interviewed in an Associated Press report on the survey.  An 18-year-old named Ganesh Nair said, "When you're talking to AI, you are always right.  You're always interesting.  You are always emotionally justified."

           

The researchers also found that teens were more sophisticated than you might think about the reliability of AI and the wisdom of using it as a substitute for "meat" friends.  Half of those surveyed said they do not trust advice given to them by AI, although the younger teens tended to be more trusting.  And two-thirds said that their interactions with AI were less satisfying than those with real-life friends, but one-third said they were either about the same or better.  And four out of five teens spend more time with real friends than with AI.

 

The picture that emerges from the survey itself, as opposed to somewhat hyped news reports, is one of curiosity, cautious use, and skepticism.  However, there may be a small number of teens who either turn to AI as a more trusted interlocutor than live friends, or develop unhealthy dependencies of various kinds with AI chatbots. 

 

At present, we are witnessing an uncontrolled experiment in how young people deal with AI companions.  The firms backing these systems with their multibillion-dollar server farms and sophisticated software are motivated to engage young people especially, as habits developed before age 20 or so tend to stay with us for a lifetime.  It's hard to picture a teenager messaging ChatGPT to "grow old along with me," but it may be happening somewhere.

 

I once knew a woman in New England who kept a life-size cloth doll in her house, made to resemble a former husband.  Most people would regard this as a little peculiar.  But what difference is there between that sort of thing and spending time in online chats with a piece of software that simulates a caring and sympathetic friend?  The interaction with AI is more private, at least until somebody hacks the system.  But why does the notion of teenagers who spend time chatting with Character as though it were a real person bother us?

 

By saying "us," I implicitly separate myself from teens who do this sort of thing.  But there are teens who realize the dangers of AI overuse or misuse, and older teens especially expressed concerns to the AP reporter that too much socializing with chatbots could be bad. 

 

The same teen quoted above got "spooked" about AI companions when he learned that a friend of his used his companion to compose a Dear Jill message to his girlfriend of two years when he decided to break up.  I suppose that is not much different than a nineteenth-century swain paging through a tome entitled "Letters for All Occasions," although I doubt that even the Victorians were that thorough in providing examples for the troubled ex-suitor. 

 

Lurking in the background of all this is a very old theological principle:  idolatry.  An idol is anything less than God that we treat as God, in the sense of resorting to it for help instead of God.  For those who don't believe in God, idolatry would seem to be an empty concept.  But even atheists can see the effects of idolatry in extreme cases, even if they don't acknowledge the God who should be worshipped instead of the idol.

 

For a teen in a radically dysfunctional household, turning to an AI companion might be a good alternative, but a kind, loving human being would always be better.  Kind, loving human beings aren't always available, though, and so perhaps an AI companion would suffice in a pinch like a "donut" spare tire until you can get the flat fixed.  But you shouldn't drive on a temporary tire indefinitely, and teens who make AI companions a regular and significant part of their social lives are probably headed for problems.

 

What kind of problems?  Dependency, for one thing.  The AI firms are not promoting their companions out of the kindness of their collective hearts, and the more people rely on their products the more money they make.  The researchers who executed the survey are concerned that teens who use AI companions that never argue, never disagree with them, and validate everything they say, will be ill-prepared for the real world where other humans have their own priorities, interests, and desires. 

 

In an ideal world, every teen would have a loving mother and father they would trust with their deepest concerns, and perhaps friends as well who would give them good advice.  Not many of us grew up in that ideal world, however, and so perhaps teens in really awful situations may find some genuine solace in turning to AI companions rather than humans.

 

The big news of this survey is the fact that use of AI companions among teens is so widespread, though still in the minority.  The next thing to do is to focus on those small numbers of teens for which AI companions are not simply something fun to play with, but form a deep and significant part of their emotional lives.  These are the teens we should be the most concerned about, and finding out why they get so wrapped up with AI companions and what needs the companions satisfy will take us a long way toward understanding this new potential threat to the well-being of teenagers, who are the future of our society.

 

Sources:  The AP article "Teens say they are turning to AI for friendship" appears on the AP website at https://apnews.com/article/ai-companion-generative-teens-mental-health-9ce59a2b250f3bd0187a717ffa2ad21f, and the Common Sense Media survey on which it was based is at https://www.commonsensemedia.org/sites/default/files/research/report/talk-trust-and-trade-offs_2025_web.pdf.