TikTok and the Chinese Connection

 

One of the newest stars in the social-media constellations is TikTok, a free video-sharing app that is very popular among young users.  Ostensibly, you have to be at least 13 to join TikTok, but such age limits are notoriously easy to evade.  Like other social-media apps, the TikTok app has various ways of making money, including advertising, contests, and in-app purchases.  It was the first non-Meta app (e. g. not Facebook or its ilk) to reach the threshold of three billion downloads worldwide, even with the handicap of being banned in India.

 

The reason India banned TikTok in 2019, only two years after it went global, was that an Indian court viewed it as a source of pornographic content and a medium likely to be used by sexual predators.  In 2020, the Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology issued a permanent ban, citing national security concerns.  Although there have been efforts to ban TikTok in the U. S., they have been unsuccessful so far.

 

TikTok is a wholly-owned subsidiary of ByteDance, a company based in China.  The U. S. division of TikTok recently made the news when five executives resigned after facing interference by ByteDance into the U. S. organization's internal workings. According to an article originally published in National Review, one executive complained that "A lot of our guidance came from HQ, and we weren't necessarily part of strategy building. . . . I don't want to be told what to do."  Coming after earlier reports of a leaked strategy document from ByteDance that ordered subsidiaries to "play down the China connection," one wonders just how tight a rein ByteDance holds on its foreign TikTok operations.

 

Nothing major goes on in China without at least the passive acquiescence of the government.  So we can be sure that Chinese government leaders are aware of what ByteDance is doing.  This is one reason that the TikTok app itself is not available in China.  Instead, a modified version called Douyin is available there.  But the leaked document urges PR people to respond to questions about Chinese control of TikTok by saying that "TikTok is not available in China."  It's the truth, it's nothing but the truth, but it's not the whole truth.

 

The question of how much control a central ownership hub should exert over foreign subsidiaries is nothing new.  Dodgy things were done during World War II with regard to American-owned properties in Nazi Germany, at least up to the point when Germany blocked American assets there once the U. S. declared war on Germany. 

 

The U. S. isn't at war with China.  But one could be pardoned for wondering why China is exporting tons of fentanyl for illegal consumption in the U. S.  Perhaps it's in revenge for the Opium Wars, a sordid episode in the relationship between China and the West that forced China to open its doors to opium imported from British-colonized India in the 1800s.  Whatever the reason, some people doubt that China has the best interests of the U. S. at heart, and look with suspicion on the way ByteDance is consolidating control of TikTok in China.

 

Starting in the 1990s, globalizing free trade became a worldwide goal and, just as Adam Smith would have predicted, raised the living standards of billions of people around the globe.  Most of these were in the developing world, but Walmart wouldn't be able to sell most of its stuff as cheaply as it does if it weren't for China, so to that extent the U. S. benefited as well. 

 

But lately, we are seeing a variety of ways in which the pernicious effects of social media are becoming increasingly obvious—in the toxicity of political discourse, in the soaring rates of depression and suicide among young people, and in the general distractedness of the U. S. population.  A purely U. S. version of TikTok might not be much better than the one we have, but the fact that its strings are being pulled by Chinese masters adds a sinister look to an already fraught situation.

 

If sovereignty means anything, it means that a sovereign government can control the kind of activities and commerce that foreign-owned and foreign-operated enterprises conduct.  So as a theoretical matter, the U. S. would be entirely in its rights to ban TikTok outright, as India in fact has.  Yes, there would be a howl, but people would get over it.  And probably something similar to TikTok would spring up overnight and try to evade the ban. 

 

But that presumes a unity and coherence of action on the part of government which is notably absent today.  As with everything else, a serious movement to ban TikTok would become politicized, with Republicans (probably) favoring it and Democrats (probably) opposing the ban on account of free speech, or possibly even just because the Republicans favor it and we're opposed to whatever Republicans are in favor of.  And then the outcome would depend on which party controls the levers of power, unless there is a stalemate. 

 

That is the good old small-d democratic way, but social media itself has thrown numerous monkey wrenches in the formerly smooth operations of democratic governance.  I have never viewed TikTok, but by its reputation it doesn't seem that political.  (I wouldn't put it past the Beto for Texas Governor campaign to put an ad on it, though—he reportedly joined TikTok in March of 2020, just in time for COVID-19.) 

 

I begin to wonder whether we are ever going to get back to the former compromising and horse-trading that went on when U. S. politicians knew both how to condemn the other side in fiery speeches, and then join their opposite-aisle colleagues at the bar after work for a friendly chat about how to wrangle out legislation that would leave most parties at least partly satisfied.  The current style of take-no-prisoners scorched-earth politics may make for entertaining sound bites, but it doesn't get much done.  Including banning TikTok, if in fact that is what we ought to do.

 

Sources:  The article "TikTok Execs Resign After Being Asked to Take Orders from Parent Company" originally appeared in National Review, but was republished at https://www.yahoo.com/video/tiktok-execs-resign-being-asked-143812196.html.  I also referred to an article at Gizmodo at https://gizmodo.com/tiktok-master-messaging-pr-playbook-china-music-1849334736, the website GoBankingRates at https://www.gobankingrates.com/money/business/how-does-tiktok-make-money/, and the Wikipedia articles "TikTok" and "Censorship of TikTok." 

Is China Moving Toward Geoengineering?

 

Earlier this month, the State Council of China (its main administrative body) announced that it was planning to expand its weather-modification efforts to cover an area of about 5.5 million square kilometers, which is more than half the size of the United States.  In addition to rainmaking (which the announcement called "precipitation control"), the government-funded efforts include prevention of hailstorms, enhanced accuracy of weather forecasts, and emergency response plans to deal with crises such as forest fires.

 

This is not China's first venture into weather modification.  To prevent rain from dampening the festivitives at the opening of the 2008 Olympics in Beijing on August 8 of that year, over a thousand rockets filled with silver iodide crystals were fired into the skies prior to the event.  Whether the party would have been rained out without the rockets is something we'll never know, but the Party leaders didn't want to take a chance that rain would spoil their parade.

 

Not counting things such as Indian rain dances, the history of scientific weather modification goes back to the late 1940s, when meteorologist Bernard Vonnegut (brother of author Kurt) and the Nobelist Irving Langmuir independently found ways to encourage clouds to form precipitation.  Vonnegut's method involved silver iodide crystals, and the U. S. Army showed in large-scale experiments that spreading finely-divided crystals into actual clouds could cause or increase rainfall under certain conditions. 

 

In the U. S., large-scale cloud-seeding efforts are no longer common, although numerous experiments with hurricanes and conventional storms were carried out as late as the 1970s.  For one thing, it is difficult to do a controlled experiment with cloud seeding, as no two clouds are ever alike and the ideal of changing only one variable (to seed or not to seed) can never be achieved.  Consequently, the typical outcome of an experiment, which can cost many thousands of dollars in flight time, shells, or rockets, is "well, maybe it did something, but we're not sure."  Another issue is that if more rain comes down in location A, that same rain can't also fall in location B, and if A and B are in different states, for example, you have a potential conflict between administrative entities.

 

That may be one reason that, after employing weather modification to a limited extent in theVietnam War, the U. S. signed the Environmental Modification Convention in 1978, which  bans the use of weather modification for hostile purposes.  The Peoples' Republic of China is also a participant in that convention, but that may not make adjacent countries such as India feel much better, as China could always claim that their cloud seeding was for peaceful purposes.

 

The term "geoengineering" is usually reserved for technological activities that would affect the entire globe, not just a part of it.  For example, at various times scientists have floated the idea that to combat global warming, we should inject a lot of sulfur dioxide particles into the air in order to reduce the influx of radiation to the earth's surface and counteract the greenhouse effect of rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere.  So far, weather modification efforts on the scale that we have seen historically don't amount to geoengineering.  But if the area in which such work is being done gets large enough, and 5.5 million square kilometers is pretty large, then you can begin to wonder whether we are putting the robustness of large-scale weather systems to a test.

 

We already know that seemingly subtle shifts in things such as the El Niño circulation off the Pacific coast of South America can have significant effects on our weather here in North America.  I don't know anything about typical weather patterns in the Far East, but it only stands to reason that mucking around with the weather over a large enough area of China is going to have some kind of effect in areas outside the region as well. 

 

Of course, this assumes that everything the State Council wants to do is successful.  If the history of weather modification tells us anything, it says that the best-laid plans in this field turn out to work less well than the designers hoped they would.  But most of the large-scale experiments in cloud seeding were carried out decades ago, before the advent of modern supercomputer-based weather modeling and enhanced automated weather data acquisition.  It's quite possible that with modern weather-forecasting technology, something closer to a truly controlled experiment can be carried out that will give us a better idea of whether all that silver iodide is doing any good, or whether it's just as useless as shooting off fireworks.

 

China has the dubious advantage of not having to worry about interstate lawsuits or any of the other administrative inconveniences that go with democracy.  Dictatorships can do large-scale, long-term things that democracies find difficult.  It's not an advantage that I personally think is worth the cost, but if the State Council decides to do a thing, there's not much anybody else can do to stop them, whether it's weather modification or a one-child policy. 

 

If the experiments turn out to be successful, I doubt that China will be very generous in sharing the results with the rest of the world, except maybe to brag.  And even if everything works as well as they hope, I'm not sure how applicable the results will be for the rest of the world, unless Russia or some other country dealing with huge land masses gets interested. 

 

You've probably heard someone say, "water is the new oil," meaning that as populations increase and live in cities with modern water supplies, the need for clean water may outstrip the need for fossil fuels.  While water resources will always be important, if weather modification turns out to be as useful as China thinks, that will add a new factor to the question of where future generations will find enough water to use.  My suspicion is that the basic natural processes that put water in the air in the first place are not going to change that much by means of weather modification, and any changes China or any other country can make will be relatively small-scale and short-term.  But I've been wrong before.

 

Sources:  The South China Morning Post carried an article describing the Chinese State Council's announcement of its plans for weather modification at https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/03/asia/china-weather-modification-cloud-seeding-intl-hnk/.  I also referred to the Wikipedia articles on cloud seeding, the Environmental Modification Convention, and El Niño.

Facing Google In Your Living Room

An article on cnet.com recently described how Google's new smart assistant, called Google Nest Hub Max, uses facial recognition technology to tell who is talking with it.  This feature has raised privacy concerns, as Google has admitted that they reserve the right to upload facial data from it to the cloud to help improve "product experience."  But whatever Google does legitimately, a hacker might be able to do too, and so we are approaching a time when the telescreens of George Orwell's dystopian fantasy novel Nineteen Eighty-Four have become a reality—not because of the unilateral command of a totalitarian government (at least not in the U. S.), but because we want what they can do.

For those unfamiliar with the novel, Orwell's book was a warning to the free world to beware of what a dictatorship could do with communications technologies of the future.  Telescreens were two-way televisions on which propaganda by a dictator known only as Big Brother is transmitted, and through which images of whoever is watching are transmitted back to the party's central headquarters.  Orwell was simply extrapolating the efforts of regimes such as the Nazis of the 1930s and the Soviet Union of the 1940s to spy on their populace twenty-four hours a day to enforce total obedience to the regime. 

At the time the novel was published in 1949, no one took the telescreen-spying idea very seriously, because it would take a huge number of human monitors to spy on a significant number of people.  Carried to its logical extreme, the only way the government could watch everybody would be if half the population spied on the other half, and then took turns. 

But neither Orwell nor anybody else at the time reckoned on the development of advanced artificial-intelligence (AI) systems using facial recognition technology.  In China, the government is deploying many thousands of cameras and taking facial data from millions of people with the intention of developing a Social Credit rating that measures how well you measure up to the regime's model of the ideal citizen.  If you have been caught on camera by computers going to suspicious places or meetings, your Social Credit score could go in the tank, making it hard to travel, get a job, or even stay out of jail. 

None of that is happening in the U. S., but the fact that a large corporation will now have electronic access to views in millions of private residences should at least give us pause. 

Leaving the hardware aside for the moment, let's examine the difference in motives between a government, such as in Nineteen Eighty-Four, spying on its citizens for the purposes of controlling behavior, and a commercial entity such as Google using images to sell both its own services and advertising for others.  The government spying is motivated by suspicion and fear of what people might be doing while the government isn't watching them.  Whatever the regime sets out as an ideal of behavior, it watches for deviations from that ideal, and punishes those who deviate from it.  Participation is not voluntary, and people have to go to great lengths to avoid being spied on.

Now contrast that with a benign-looking thing such as the Google Nest Hub Max.  Nobody is going to make you buy one.  And if you do, there are ways of turning off the facial-recognition feature, though it will be less convenient to use.  And the device is intended to serve you, not the other way around.  It's sold with the vision portrayed in so many TV ads of people happily using it to make their lives better, not for means of social control like Orwell's telescreens. 

But maybe the differences are not as great as they first appear.  Both the telescreen and the Nest Hub Max are intended to change behavior.  If they don't, they have failed.  True, the ideal behavior that a totalitarian government wants and the ideal behavior that a company wants are two different things.  But neither ideal is the way the citizen-consumer was before the screen or Nest Hub shows up, namely, unwatched and unbenefited by the products or services that the company wants to sell.

Nobody should read this blog and then go around saying "Ahh, Stephan's saying Google is Big Brother and they're trying to take over our lives!"  That's not the comparison I'm making.  My point is that the mere fact of being watched by someone, or something that can inform someone about us, is going to change our behavior.  And that change by itself is significant.

Now, the change may not necessarily be bad.  Already, virtual audio assistant devices such as Alexa have been used in criminal cases when bad actors set them off, either by accident or on purpose, and the data thus generated has proved to be incriminating.  Though this is ancient history, I am told that in the days when some middle-class and upper-class people had servants, families tended to behave better when the servants were around, although I'm sure there were exceptions.  Alexa isn't Jeeves the butler, but as virtual assistants play a more significant role in domestic life, it's not beyond imagination to think that some of the worst behavior in homes—domestic abuse, for example—might be mitigated if the victim could call 911 by just shouting it instead of having to pull out a phone.

I'm not necessarily crying doom and gloom here.  Millions of people are already using virtual assistants with few if any problems, and adding two-way video to the mix will only increase the devices' capabilities.  But we are entering a new territory of connectivity here, and it's bound to have some effects that nobody has predicted yet.  Perhaps it's not too helpful to predict that there will be unpredictable effects, but right now that's all I can do at the moment.  Let's hope that the security features of the Nest Home Max are good enough to prevent nefarious use, and that people who buy them are truly happier with them than they were before. 

Sources:  The article "Google collects face data now.  Here's what it means and how to opt out" appeared on Sept. 11, 2019 at https://www.cnet.com/how-to/google-collects-face-data-now-what-it-means-and-how-to-opt-out/#ftag=CADf328eec.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on Nineteen Eighty-Four and Google Home.  I thank my wife for pointing this article out to me.

Has Human Gene Editor Been Edited Himself?

Dr. Jiankue He of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, claims to have used a gene-editing technology called CRISPR/Cas9 to edit the genes of twin girls in order to make the babies resistant to the AIDS virus carried by their father.  When news of his experiment leaked out, scientists and governments around the world attacked him for doing what is widely viewed as an unethical experiment.  After Dr. He tried to defend himself at a Human Genome Editing Summit in Hong Kong at the end of November, the president of Dr. He's university reportedly collected him and took him back to Shenzhen, and his whereabouts are presently unknown.  He is no longer answering his phone, his lab has been shut down, a company he founded has lost contact with him, and one report says he has been placed under house arrest. 

First, a little background.  It will be very little because biology and bioengineering is not my forte, to say the least.  CRISPR is an acronym for some DNA sequences that are found widely in cells, and these sequences are used with an enzyme in a technology called CRISPR/Cas9 to edit DNA.  So in the last fifteen years or so, we have gone from reading the human genome (the goal of the Human Genome Project, completed in 2003) to editing the genes of human beings—at least if Dr. He has done what he says he's done.

From a scientific point of view, his claims remain unsubstantiated, because he has not yet published anything about this particular experiment in a peer-reviewed journal.  He apparently intended to do so when news of it leaked out, and Dr. He decided to post information about it to forestall rumors.  What he posted did a lot more than that.

There's enough questionable ethical practices in this incident for several columns.  The most prominent one is whether Dr. He did wrong in deliberately manipulating the gene sequence of human embryos and then implanting them back in the mother to be born.  Nothing has been said about how many unsuccessful tries were made along these lines, but if this experiment was like others, the yield rate was probably very small. 

Besides that question, there is the problem of talking about controversial experiments prior to peer review.  We still don't have any verification as to whether Dr. He really did what he said, although he has a good track record in the field of previous genetics research in less controversial areas.  But given the nature of his situation, Dr. He probably did the least bad thing in releasing more information rather than just letting rumors run wild.

What is most interesting to me is the way the government of China has reacted to the firestorm of controversy.  Up to now, Dr. He has been treated like a golden boy, being allowed to study abroad at Rice and Stanford, receiving a coveted Thousand Talents Award to set up his own lab, and founding or being involved in six companies focused on commercializing aspects of his research.  Earlier this year he announced that he was taking a leave from his university position to concentrate on his commercial activities. 

But once news leaked of his alleged CRISPR/Cas9 experiment with the twins and criticisms began to mount, the weather changed fast.  China currently has no inconvenient encumbrances, such as the legal concept of due process, to delay rapid and decisive action on the part of its government.  So when someone high up in the power structure decided that Dr. He was no longer an asset, his fate was sealed.  It may be months or years before we find out exactly what has happened to him, but for now, his high-flying career appears to be at an end.  What the government gave, the government can take away, and apparently has.

There is an odd parallel here between what the Chinese government has done to Dr. He, and what Dr. He has reportedly done to the twins.  For years, he enjoyed the freedom to study at the best universities in the world, to follow his investigations into the secrets of the genome, and to speculate on commercial applications of his ideas.  But in a matter of weeks, it's been taken away, at least for the time being.

At least Dr. He had the opportunity to judge whether his experiment might land him in hot water.  He may have judged wrong, but he was free to refrain as well as to go ahead.  The twins—referred to in news reports only as Lulu and Nana—have had no choice whatsoever.  From the time they were born, they became participants for life in an experiment that was not of their choosing.  If what Dr. He claims to have done is true, they are the first human beings on Earth whose intrinsic genetic makeup came about not only through the volition of their parents, grandparents, and ancestors stretching back before the dawn of human history, but also through the deliberate mechanical technology of CRISPR/Cas9. 

Is this a tragedy?  A lot of people seem to think so.  Judging from the swiftness of the negative reactions heaped on Dr. He's head, most of them arose from what bioethicist Leon Kass calls the "yuck factor."  Some ideas and actions are just intuitively revolting to most people, and fiddling with a human embryo's genes fall into this category.  Given the magnitude of the opprobrium, the government of China saw a threat to their hoped-for reputation as a leader in rapidly advancing scientific fields such as biotechnology, and removed Dr. He from public (and maybe even private) view.  One researcher going a bit too far is disposable.  But China's long-term plans in this area are not known.

The more basic question raised by this research, and one that has not been addressed much so far in news reports on it, is whether human life is really distinct, set apart, or holy compared to other life.  If it is, then a whole array of things that are now legal and even praised in some circles, ranging from mix-and-match in-vitro fertilization to abortion, are highly questionable, to say the least.  If it isn't—if playing with human genes is no more harmful than what the Jesuit priest Gregor Mendel did to his bean plants to figure out the basics of genetics over a century ago—then I would ask, what's the big deal?  Once you've gotten over the shock of novelty, human gene editing will fade into the background and become just another way we mess with ourselves technologically.  I hope that never becomes the case, but unless we use this controversy to open up a wider inquiry into what the limits of biotechnology should be, I'm afraid we'll look back on Dr. He's case and wonder what all the fuss was about.

Sources:  The Australian Broadcasting Company posted a report about Dr. He's disappearance at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-07/chinese-scientist-who-edited-twins-genes-he-jiankui-missing/10588528.  I also referred to a report of theirs on the experiment itself at https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-27/china-gene-edited-babies/10556676. 

Exporting Enslavement: China’s Illiberal Artificial Intelligence

In 1989, I had the privilege of visiting Tiananmen Square in Beijing only a few months after the famous June Fourth protests that the Chinese govermnent violently suppressed.  Our tour guide showed us black marks on the pavement that were left by fires during the conflict—a memory that has not faded.

Much has changed since then.  China is now a world leader in many areas of science and technology, including artificial intelligence (AI).  But the nature of the Chinese government has not changed, and as Ryan Khurana points out in a recent online article in National Review, its illiberal policies may transform AI into a weapon that similar governments around the world can use to enslave their citizens. 

To avoid confusion, I should define a couple of political terms.  In the sense I intend here, the term liberal refers to what political scientists call “classical liberalism.”  Simply put, a liberal government in this sense encourages the liberty of its citizens.  It acknowledges  fundamental rights such as the right to life, the rights to worship freely and express one’s views without fear of government reprisal, and the right to participate meaningfully in political affairs.  The intention of the founders of the United States of America was to form a liberal government in this sense.

By contrast, illiberal governments are top-down operations in which those in charge have essentially unlimited power over the mass of citizens.  Most monarchies were set up this way in theory, and from its founding the Peoples’ Republic of China has behaved in a consistently illiberal way, and continues to do so under President Xi Jinping.  Anything that assists the Chinese government in spying on its citizens, learning about their private as well as public actions, and controlling their behavior so that they conform to a model pleasing to the government is going to get a lot of support.  And AI fits this bill perfectly, which is one reason why China is not only pouring billions into AI R&D, but exporting it to other countries that want to spy on their people too.

Khurana points out that Zimbabwe, an African country well-known for its human-rights abuses, has received advanced Chinese AI technology from a startup company in exchange for letting the firm have access to the country’s facial-recognition database.  So China is helping the government of Zimbabwe to keep tabs on its citizens as well.  Maybe Zimbabwe will come up with something like China’s recently announced Social Credit system, which is a sort of personal reliability rating that eventually every person in China will receive.  Think credit rating, only one based on the government’s electronic dossier of your behavior:  what stores you visit, what friends you have, what meetings you go to, what TV shows you watch, and whether you go to church. 

Khurana says that we are engaged in a kind of arms race reminiscent of the old Cold War conflict between the Soviet Union and its satellites, and what used to be called the Free World.  Back then, the game was to see whether the U. S. or the U. S. S. R. could dangle the most attractive technological baubles in front of this or that country to tempt it toward one side or the other.  It wasn’t only military technology, but weaponry was the trump card. 

Things are different now, and AI is not like a howitzer—you can do lots of things with it, both peaceful and warlike.  Or liberal and illiberal.  But unless a smaller country has already developed a capable AI technological base of its own, it is likely to want only turn-key systems already designed to do particular things.  And companies in China who have learned how to help the government use AI to monitor and control people will naturally find it easiest to help other governments do the same illiberal thing.

Khurana says the U. S. side is currently losing this battle.  The federal government and military have been slow to get up to speed on using AI for defensive purposes.  When the Department of Defense tried to engage Google in a cooperative AI project to identify terrorists, the company pulled out, and other attempts to use AI in the military have been stymied because critical pieces of intellectual property turn out to be linked to Russian or Chinese ownership. 

There are two aspects to this problem.  The international aspect is that around the world, Chinese AI is coming with illiberal strings attached, and governments with little interest in protecting their citizens’ freedom are eagerly following China’s lead in using AI to spy on and suppress their peoples.  The domestic aspect is that the U. S. is going perhaps too far in the direction of pretending that we are all one big happy AI family, and that we can get AI technology from anywhere in the world and use it for our own private, liberal, or defensive purposes. 

But the world is not that way.  Back when wars depended mainly on hardware, nations contemplating future conflicts made sure they stockpiled essential materials such as tungsten and vanadium before starting a war.  Now that international conflicts increasingly involve cyberwarfare and AI-powered technology, it is foolish and shortsighted to ignore the fact that China is flooding the globe with their AI products and services, and to pretend we don’t have to worry about it and will always be able to outsmart them.  Physical weapons have a way of being used, and the same is true of AI designed for illiberal purposes.  Let’s hope that freedom doesn’t get trampled underfoot in the rush of many countries to get on the Chinese AI bandwagon.

Sources:  Ryan Khurana’s article “The Rise of Illiberal Artificial Intelligence” appeared on the website of National Review on Aug. 10, 2018 at https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/08/china-artificial-intelligence-race/.

Exploding E-Cigarettes and Ethical Theories

A recent article in the engineering magazine IEEE Spectrum describes how numerous users of e-cigarettes have received injuries ranging from minor to life-threatening when their devices caught fire or exploded.  E-cigarettes work by vaporizing a solution of nicotine and flavoring with a hot wire powered by a high-energy-density lithium-ion battery.  Lithium-ion batteries are in everything from mobile phones to airliners, but the particular design of e-cigarettes makes them especially hazardous in this application.  The high power required by the heater means that the battery is operating perilously near the maximum output current that it can maintain without overheating itself.  And if there are any manufacturing defects in the battery, as can often happen if substandard components are used by a fly-by-night manufacturer with inadequate quality control, the e-cigarette user ends up carrying around what amounts to a small pipe bomb.

The consequences can be dire.  The article tells the story of Otis Gooding, whose e-cigarette went off in his pants pocket, injuring both his thigh and the hand he used to try to get rid of it.  Other users have lost eyes, teeth, and parts of their cheeks to explosions and fires.

Anecdotes, however harrowing, do not constitute numerical evidence that the typical e-cigarette user is taking his or her life in their hands when they light up.  But various sources have estimated that the incidents of e-cigarette explosions or fires is in the dozens if not hundreds a year. 

The e-cigarette market had total sales exceeding $2 billion in 2016, and assuming the average user spends $150 a year on the habit, that means over 10 million people in the U. S. are likely regular users.  Say 100 of these have fireworks-type problems with their devices, and that amounts to an incidence of 1 per 100,000 per year, which is the type of ratio that public-health epidemiologists like to use.  Just to put that in perspective, deaths in the U. S. from lung cancer in the period 2011-2015 averaged about 43 per 100,000.  One of the advantages touted for e-cigarettes is that they don’t produce the tar and other nasty stuff that leads to lung cancer in regular cigarette smokers.  While e-cigarettes haven’t been around long enough for this assertion to be empirically verified—nobody  has been an e-cigarette user for forty years yet—there is probably something to this argument.

And such an argument would appeal to a certain type of ethical theorist called a utilitarian.  Utilitarians decide what the right thing is to do based on the greatest good for the greatest number.  A utilitarian might look at this situation and say, “Okay, we have Case A and Case B.  In Case A, 10 million people satisfy their craving for nicotine with plain old coffin-nails, and as a result a good many more than 43 of them die of lung cancer every year.  In Case B, we have the same 10 million people smoking e-cigarettes.  A lot fewer of them die of lung cancer, at the price of only one unlucky person whose e-cigarette explodes in his face.  Clearly, Case B is better.”

And if you put it that way, it’s hard to argue the point.  But we don’t live idealized lives in which we’re always choosing between two clearly-defined cases.  And if I were an e-cigarette user (which I am not), I would still be concerned about the chances that my device could blow up or catch fire.  But the utilitiarian won’t help me.

So I go looking in the catalog of ethical theories and find something called virtue ethics.  Basically, virtue ethics encourages cultivation of the virtues, of which there are almost as many as there are virtue ethicists.  Of the virtues we could choose from, I’ll pick one that doesn’t have a particularly fancy name, but will work for our purposes:  thoughtfulness. 

If you open a cabinet door while making breakfast one morning, and then think to close it afterwards not because you want to (open cabinet doors don’t bother you at all) but because your wife has a thing about open cabinet doors, you’re being thoughtful.  What does thoughtfulness say about the situation of defective e-cigarettes leading to explosions and fires?

Well, it draws attention to the proximate causes of those explosions and fires, which in most cases prove to be defective lithium-ion batteries supplied by shady manufacturers who are almost exclusively in China, which is where most of the devices and their components are made.  Now there’s over a billion people in China, and probably most of them are doing the best they can in their lives, trying to improve their lot and fulfill their obligations.  China is a haven for entrepreneurs right now, especially in the exploding (so to speak) growth market of e-cigarettes.  And in a world economy where low prices speak louder than almost any other consideration, the organization that can underbid everybody else tends to get the business.  And so probably the management of a shady lithium-ion battery factory feels caught between the rock of maintaining quality and reliability on the one hand, and the hard place of not pricing their product above the minimum needed to get the business. 

The virtue ethicists would tell the makers of e-cigarettes to clean up their act.  “How would you like to be one of the customers whose lips are sent to Kingdom Come by one of your bad batteries?” they might ask.  Of course, if one company spends the money to improve the quality of their batteries, there may be another one around the corner willing to skip quality control and underbid the first company.  The e-cigarette makers who buy batteries also have reputations to uphold, and so they could also pay attention to the sermon of a virtue ethicist and take more responsibility for the quality of their products.  In any event, it’s easy to see that virtue ethics provides you with more reasons to do something about this situation than utilitarianism does.

This is not to say that utilitiarianism is useless.  In situations where there are lots of data to work with, utilitarian analyses can clarify choices between comparable courses of action.  But sooner or later, it always runs up against the questions of how to quantify good, and who to include in the greatest number.  And there are no universally agreed-upon answers to those questions.

Sources:  The print version of IEEE Spectrum carried the article “When E-Cigarettes Go Boom” on pp. 42-45 of the July 2018 issue.  A briefer version appeared on their website in February 2018 at https://spectrum.ieee.org/consumer-electronics/portable-devices/exploding-ecigarettes-are-a-growing-danger-to-public-health.  The statistic about lung cancer was obtained from https://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/lungb.html, and the sales figures for e-cigarettes are from https://www.statista.com/statistics/285143/us-e-cigarettes-dollar-sales/.

Of Pecans, Profits, and Piety

Broadly speaking, the system of international trade we live under is a kind of technology.  It’s certain that without modern engineered means of transportation and communications, international markets would be much less significant than they are today.  And while the particular story I’m going to relate pertains to the oldest technology in human history, namely farming, the lesson behind it applies to many fields of engineering.

The pecan tree is the state tree of Texas.  (In case you’ve never heard a Texan say it, it’s pronounced “puh-cawn”).  Pecan trees can grow to a height of 100 feet (30 meters) or more, live up to 1000 years, and for most of those years can produce an abundant annual crop of tasty, highly edible nuts.  When my late grandfather moved to Fort Worth, Texas in 1930, he planted a pecan tree in his back yard.  The last time I visited his house (currently occupied by other relatives), that tree was still going strong, providing shade for most of the back yard and a good bit of the house too.  Pecan trees are native to Texas and grace thousands of acres of river banks and bottom lands, besides furnishing an important food crop to pecan growers who grow hundreds of different varieties.  Pecans are sold both for direct consumption, either in the shell or hulled, and also as ingredients for processed food that benefit from the addition of chopped or blended pecans.  But until about a decade ago, the pecan market was almost entirely domestic, with a good number being sold mainly in Texas.

Then someone in China caught on to the fact that the huge market there for snack nuts, sold often in vending machines in locations such as gas stations and convenience stores, might benefit from imported pecans.  Up until then, most of the snack nuts sold were Chinese walnuts, but the cheaper pecan tastes just as good (in my opinion, anyway), and some clever Chinese importers introduced the new nut to Chinese consumers around 2001.

They liked it—liked it so much that since 2007, shipments of pecans to China from the U. S. (which includes exports from relatively new pecan-growing states such as Georgia and New Mexico as well as Texas) averaged almost 60 million pounds annually.  But there is a fly in this profitable ointment, which is the fact that the Chinese market wants a particular kind of “improved” pecan, not the rich variety of our native pecans.

According to an article in Texas Monthly by James McWilliams, the hybrid improved pecans have a uniform size, uniformly thin shells, and uniform quality.  These improved varieties will work in the Chinese vending machines, which can’t handle the variation in shapes and sizes of native varieties.  Texas pecan growers have known about the Chinese market for years, but so far they have exhibited a marked reluctance to chop down their existing groves, many of which are native varieties, to plant the improved type that produces machine-vendable pecans.   In so doing, they are losing year by year a potential market that could allow Texas to surpass the newer pecan-growing states and once more lead the nation in pecan exports.

That takes care of pecans and profits; now for the piety.  I have been reading a book called Food & Faith, a work of theological musings about the connections between eating and Christianity.  The author, Norman Wirzba, relies on the works of agrarians such as Wendell Berry as well as more explicitly theological writers.  But I was struck by the following passage from the book as expressing exactly what is going on between the Chinese pecan market and Texas pecan growers:  “Food that may have begun in the ground [or on a tree] must lose all traces of soil, sunlight, and fragile plant and animal life so that it can be redesigned, engineered [!], improved, packaged, stored, and delivered in whatever ways the food producer sees fit.”  Wirzba’s book, among many other things, is an impassioned plea to stop thinking about food and eating merely in material and economic terms. 

Viewed one way, it only makes sense for Texas pecan farmers to replant their groves with machine-friendly pecan trees, for the more efficient production of pecans that will contribute to the efficient international trade that efficiently fills vending machines with pecans that Chinese consumers can eat to fuel the machines called their bodies. 

But viewed another way, there is incalculable value in tending native pecan trees which are so deeply connected at multiple levels to a part of the world that Texans, at least, view as God’s country.  Not that His title to the rest of the world is defective in any serious way.  But as a recent arrival here from California said to me the other day, “Texans seem to have a loyalty to their state that I haven’t noticed anywhere else.”  And native pecan trees are part of what makes Texas the place it is.  I find reassuring the fact that just down the road from where I live, in Seguin, you can visit Pape’s Pecan Nutcracker Museum, and view both stationary and portable World’s Largest Pecans.  One is a concrete model on a pedestal on the town square, and the other, welded out of steel, is mounted on a trailer for convenient towing in parades.  And I would like to think that at least part of the reason that Texas pecan growers haven’t done the economically sensible and efficient thing of whacking down all their old-fashioned native trees to plant new ones for the Chinese market, is that, well, there’s more important things than money. 

It takes ten years for a new pecan sapling to mature enough to start producing.  That induces a natural tendency in pecan farmers to take the long view.  Ten years from now, the Chinese may have dropped pecans for Brazil nuts, for all I know.  But the rich biological and cultural heritage represented by the native pecan trees of Texas will live on, I hope, for many generations to come.

Sources:  I learned about the Chinese pecan market from James McWilliams’ article “Shell Game” in the Sept. 2013 edition of Texas Monthly.  It is an excerpt from his book The Pecan:  A History of America’s Native Nut to be published in October 2013.  I also referred to an online article about the pecan market posted by Nature’s Finest Foods Ltd. (a brokerage firm) at http://www.nffonline.com/industry-news/2013/06/19/pecan-exports-china-falter and an item by the Whitney Consulting Group posted on Google Docs (account required) at https://docs.google.com/file/d/1l9XwHsObwgS8O9OERlQwUqaF_IEoBXSVhQLpcnLvwnLpB_fwr-kY1pSeeVdl/edit.  Norman Wirzba’s Food & Faith:  A Theology of Eating was published in 2011 by Cambridge University Press.