When Engineering Becomes Culture: The Texas Transportation Museum

  

Every field needs a foundational philosophy, and I've never found a better one for ethics than St. Thomas Aquinas's fundamental principle of moral philosophy.  While I can't cite chapter and verse for an exact quote, it goes something like this:  "The good ought to be done and evil avoided." 

 

Sounds kind of obvious when you put it into words.  And of course, it raises the question of what is good and what is evil.  But citing that principle allows me to place the Texas Transportation Museum under the wide umbrella of engineering ethics.  In what follows, I'll try to answer the question, "Is the Texas Transportation Museum a good thing?"

 

I was unaware of its existence until a few weeks ago when I was looking for a place to take a day trip and discovered its website.  It's located just north of the San Antonio International Airport on a few dozen acres of ground donated in 1963 by the City of San Antonio to a collection of railroad enthusiasts headed by a consulting engineer named David Wallace and his friends.  The organization celebrated its 60th anniversary in 2024, and is still going as strong as an all-volunteer outfit can go.

 

Its roots as a railroad museum are obvious, as it houses numerous model-train exhibits as well as all kinds of historical memorabilia having to do with railroads.  On display outside are some full-scale artifacts from the golden years of passenger rail: a Pullman sleeping car from the 1920s, a caboose, and a steam locomotive—minus some of its hardware, true, but retaining most of the major components.  Other forms of transportation receive a nod.  In their large interior display, they have a Model A Ford, an antique fire truck, a horse-drawn steam-powered fire engine, and two or three other cars from the 1910s and 1920s.  But it's clear from the displays and the interest shown by the volunteer staff that the core of the museum is rail.

 

Maybe it's a peculiarity of American culture that a mode of transportation that for people, anyway, is largely in the past still has such an active following among primarily amateur historians.  And artists, too.  If I had to categorize the hobby of model train construction and use, I'd have to say it's art.  Like other art, it exists simply to be admired.  A friend of mine has practiced this art for decades, and although he just turned 80, he still hauls his three-by-four-foot modules of N-scale tracks and engines and boxcars around to train shows and sets them up with other fans to form convention-center-size layouts.  We don't see painters joining together on selected weekends to mount their paintings together to form one giant mural on display for a couple of days, but that's sort of what model railroaders do. 

 

And what is portrayed in this type of art?  In a word, the past.  At the Texas Transportation Museum, it's a wide-ranging past, going from the Civil War days of the hijacked wartime locomotive "The General" (the story of which a short description is on display, though it doesn't mention the Buster Keaton silent film that dramatized it) to the modern era of Amtrak.  Among the volunteers on duty were a woman in her sixties who took our money at the ticket desk, while wearing hair dyed orange, green, and blue for Halloween.  (Scattered everywhere were a lot of Halloween-themed decorations:  skeletons on tractors, dismembered limbs in Pullman fold-down beds, and other representations of our modern tacky enthusiasm for cheap horror.)  Her son, who politely held the door for us and told us when the free train ride would be, had a slight speech impediment but impeccable manners.  There were volunteers as young as a couple of men in their twenties, and as old as me, and anywhere in between. 

 

One gentleman I spent some time talking with was operating a G-scale layout that was reached by walking through an archway leading to a large garden.  G-scale, as he explained, stands for "garden."  The equipment is about 1/32 of full scale, which means the track rails are about two inches apart, and an engine is a little smaller than a small loaf of bread.  He talked about the problems of running an electric train outdoors.  The tree sap falls on the rails and interrupts the current, so every now and then he has to send around a cleaning car that has a vibrating brush that scrubs the rails.  Only the cleaning car was busted for a while and nobody knew it, so they had to fix it.  Deer and squirrels cause problems too, and there's always the wheels on the engine that need periodic cleaning.  I told him about my friend who is always battling some issue or other with his layout, and the man said, "Yes, it's never finished." 

 

But when everything runs smoothly, a model train layout gives one the sensation of God-like presence in a celestial realm above the workaday small-scale reality of the display.  And to the extent one can control the train movements through modern digital technology, one has God-like powers of transforming one's will into action.  Above all, the model railroader knows that everything in the layout is there because he put it there.  (I've seen a few lady model railroaders, but they are uncommon—it seems to be almost exclusively a male hobby.) 

 

So does the Texas Transportation Museum fulfill the injunction to do the good and avoid the evil?  I'll let the final words be those of the man who spoke briefly about the museum at the end of the few-hundred-yard excursion we took on an open passenger carriage towed by a genuine Army-surplus diesel locomotive.  He said the goal of the museum was to preserve the memory of railroads and other transportation so that the younger generation could see how things were back then, and keep the tradition going.  He also hoped people would come back for their Halloween show that they would be running the next few weekends from 5 to 9 PM, and not forget the Christmas show either.  His emotions were clearly more powerful than his words, but he thinks the Museum is a good thing, and he hopes it will continue.  Judging by the enthusiasm of a cowboy-hatted eight-year-old whose parents drove down from Dallas just so he could see the Texas Transportation Museum, I think his hope may be fulfilled. 

 

Sources:  The Texas Transportation Museum's website is https://www.txtransportationmuseum.org/, and it is open most weekends except for major holidays, weather permitting.  General admission is currently $10 a person, but donations are encouraged. 

On AI and Personhood: Pagans Will Be Pagans

  

Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute's Center on Human Exceptionalism, did a thorough job the other day of taking down the pronouncements of an Anthropic expert tasked with understanding why Anthropic AI systems like Claude behave the way they do.  A New York Times report on a day-long seminar given by Christopher Olah inspired Smith to write a long list of things Claude can't do, in contrast to Olah, who spent all day making the case that Claude should be considered as a person, not just a machine.

 

Olah described tracking Claude's "emotional vectors" and showed transcripts of conversations with one AI model which appeared to be having a nervous breakdown.  He speculated that just as humans sometimes benefit from the act of confession, maybe Claude might find the Catholic sacrament useful as well.  A rabbi who was present said that Olah and his colleagues appeared to believe that Claude models have the moral standing of a human being, and should be accorded the same rights and respect. If that is the case, the rabbi concluded, then what Anthropic is doing with their models amounts to slavery. 

 

Olah's response to this accusation was not recorded. But it doesn't matter, because Olah and his fellow AI creators are following a well-worn path that stretches back to antiquity:  the path of pagans worshipping the god they created. 

 

Smith is exactly right when he pointed out in his column that Claude is not alive, has no intrinsic value, is not conscious, does not think, cannot "feel," cannot suffer, can be damaged but not harmed, and cannot sin.  But if he thinks that well-thought-out evidence-based philosophical assertions of the non-personal status of Claude and its ilk are going to cause scales to fall from the AI community's eyes and make them say, "We see now!  It's just a machine!" he better have another think coming.  Pagans who invest a lot of work in their creations aren't easily dissuaded by some philosophical musings.  Sometimes the only thing that will convince them is power:  a power greater than their god.

 

In the Old Testament book of 1 Samuel, Chapter 5 recounts how the pagan Philistines captured the Hebrews' Ark of the Covenant and set it in their temple devoted to the pagan god Dagon.  The first night, the statue of Dagon fell over face down in front of the Ark.  After the Philistines set him up again, the next morning they found him face downward again, this time with his head and hands cut off.  After that, they decided that maybe the Ark wasn't such a good interior decoration after all, and passed it around to their friends the Ashdodites and Ekronites, to whom a plague of death and tumors happened.  While these incidents probably didn't lead to any conversions to Judaism, it did teach the pagans a lesson that the God of Israel was not to be messed with.

 

The Jewish prophet Isaiah had some choice words to say about a man who cuts down a tree and burns some of it to bake bread.  Then he turns around and uses the rest of the wood to make himself an idol:  "Half of it he burns in the fire . . . 'Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire!'  And the rest of it he makes into a god, his idol; and falls down to it and worships it; he prays to it and says, 'Deliver me, for thou art my god!'"

 

We are living at a time when old philosophical arguments and ancient pagan ways are emerging into the headlines and the living rooms of millions.  When you ask your Siri device to play jazz, what are you talking to?  The line between use and worship is not always easy to distinguish.  Everyone has the urge to worship something, and it's only natural that people who spend their working lives developing cutting-edge AI models are going to be impressed by what the work of their hands can do.  The urge to anthropomorphize AI, to spend time and emotional investment in it like it was another human being, and even to argue for its legal rights, are all understandable. 

But like all pagan worship of false gods, such moves end sooner or later in disaster, both personal and institutional.

 

I have a friend—a real flesh-and-blood person—who will listen to a news report of some complicated jam that such people have gotten themselves into, and quite often the first thing he'll say is, "Those folks need Jesus."  And he's right. 

 

We can philosophize all day and quote every philosopher from Aristotle to Roger Scruton in trying to convince AI worshippers of the fact that machines aren't people, and all the "can'ts" Wesley Smith lists are true.  But most of the AI crowd would first have to take two semesters of philosophy before they could understand what we are talking about, and even then they'd probably find some way to disagree. 

 

The followers of the Hebrew God knew what was going on with the Ark and the pagans.  Followers of Jesus know what is going on with AI worshippers.  Our first task is not to fall into the trap of idol worship ourselves.  A Martian observing a random sample of one hundred U. S. citizens on a typical day would conclude that the little oblong objects they spend so much time staring at must be something either religious or necessary to survival, or both.  Christians should be different.

 

And the next task is to live lives and do acts that convince nonbelievers of the power of God.  That's not much in evidence today, I have to admit, though there are exceptions, especially in cultures that are not saturated with modernity.  Christians don't have to absolutely reject AI and all its works, which is in any case practically impossible.  (I used Google's AI feature to look up the Old Testament references for this blog.)  But we can resist making AI an idol ourselves, and live as lights in a dark world that warms itself with half its electricity and creates AI idols with the other half.  Some things never change. 

 

Sources:  Wesley J. Smith's article "AI 'Claude' Can Never Be a Person" appeared on the National Review website at https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/ai-claude-can-never-be-a-person/.  The story of the Philistines and the Ark appears in 1 Samuel 5:1-5.  The selection from Isaiah is Isaiah 44:15-17 (Revised Standard Version).