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.