Will High-Speed Rail Ever Succeed in the U. S.?

 

So far, the answer seems to be no.  While Japan, China, and some European countries enjoy the benefits of rail travel at over 100 MPH (160 km hr^-1), the closest thing the U. S. has to a major (rather than single-point to single-point) high-speed rail system is the Acela system in the Northeast.  Yes, it does go up to 150 MPH (240 km hr^-1), but only over a stretch that's about 10% of its length. 

 

The rest of the time, Acela slows down to the relatively glacial pace of the rest of the Amtrak system, which this summer especially has been suffering more than the usual amount of delays and other problems, according to a recent article on the Slate website by Henry Grabar. 

 

Before you can enjoy high-speed rail, you have to build it.  And building such a thing in the U. S. presents an extraordinary number and magnitude of challenges, as Grabar shows from a recent New York University study on how hard it is, and how we could do things better. 

 

First off, there's the permitting process.  If you want to take a piece of land and build anything more industrial or transportation-like than houses or apartments (and sometimes even those), you must go hard-hat in hand to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which acts for all intents and purposes as a grouchy de-facto landowner who would rather have undisturbed snail darters on his property than the world's most valuable factory.  I have nothing against snail darters, but if primitive man had acted toward the natural world like the EPA tries to make the rest of us act, we'd all still be living in trees and eating nuts and berries—but only government-approved nuts and berries, of course.  And there might be as many as 50,000 of us scattered over the North American continent.

 

Even if the environmental obstacles are overcome, the next problem is getting equipment such as rails, signaling equipment, and, you know, trains.  Not surprisingly, there are no domestic high-speed rail manufacturers, and so it becomes a question of which imported model you're going to choose.  And because every high-speed rail project so far has been a one-off deal, you go out and hire consultants (because nobody has in-house expertise on high-speed rail), who then steer you this way and that and charge exorbitant fees. 

 

And even if you make it through all those difficulties, there's the not-in-my-back-yard problem.  And here we run into an issue we haven't even discussed yet:  if you build it, will they come?

 

Here I'm reminded of a much smaller-scale rail project that is familiar to me:  Austin's CapMetro rail line.  By the time it opened in 2010, it had cost north of $100 million, and while it's still running, only about 1800 people ride it on a typical weekday.  In other words, a system that cost a tenth of a billion dollars fifteen years ago keeps maybe a thousand cars off the streets of Austin.  Although it's a silly comparison, that's about $100,000 per car.  To make a noticeable dent in the hundreds of thousands of cars that make up Austin commuter traffic, you would have to improve that cost per rider number a lot, or else bankrupt the city.

 

The NYU folks have suggestions to improve the delivery of high-speed rail projects, including standardizing the equipment, streamlining the federal permitting process, and enacting a nationwide plan that would supersede little local efforts that never seem to get to reality.  I can't fault these ideas, and if the political winds blew favorably they would probably work.  But I move the previous question: if we built it, would people use it?

 

That doesn't seem to be the case with Austin's rail line.  The reason is that transportation is fundamentally a service, not a product.  And the mechanical means you use to provide the service depends on a lot of factors that are not always considered seriously.

 

Population density and local infrastructure are two of them.  In the Northeast, there are numerous cities on the Acela corridor which have public transportation systems of their own—Washington's subways, Boston's surface rail, the New York City subways—which make it not only feasible but preferable to travel entirely without aid of a private automobile.  And those cities are so situated for historical reasons—they got big before the era of the automobile got serious around 1920, and built the right-of-ways and housing and commercial patterns that make such a situation work.

 

The rest of the country, outside of maybe Chicago, and San Francisco if you count cable cars, is not so situated.  If there was a high-speed rail line from San Marcos to Fort Worth that opened tomorrow, I still probably wouldn't take it, because although I might manage to get a cheap cab to the rail station here in my town, once I got to Fort Worth I'd either have to ride the slow intermittent buses or catch Uber everywhere I went.  And frankly I'd rather have my own car with me, and the four-hour drive from here to there isn't that big a deal to me. 

 

Multiply that tradeoff by a few hundred million, and you get the real reason that the U. S. does not yet have high-speed rail, and may never have it.  It's only a partial solution to the problem, and unless and until every town of 50,000 or more people has local public transportation of comparable quality to the best subway system in the country (which used to be Washington, DC, but I'm not sure now), you will end up spending billions on a large-scale version of CapMetro's rail line:  it's pretty, it works well, and almost nobody rides it.  In other words, a smoothly-running version of Amtrak. 

 

For a while it looked like autonomous vehicles, eventually electric ones, were going to solve the problem.  But self-driving cars, at least the Level 5 kind that you can sleep in, seem to be as chimerical as they always were, and so it's not clear how people in 2060 are going to be getting to work.  My guess is that high-speed rail won't be a big part of the picture, but I might be wrong.  It's happened before.

 

Sources:  Henry Grabar's article "Train Dreams:  How high-speed rail in America can become a reality" appeared on July 12, 2024 on the Slate website at https://slate.com/business/2024/07/high-speed-rail-amtrak-transportation-policy-china-japan-europe.html.  The NYU report can be viewed at https://transitcosts.com/high-speed-rail/.  I also referred to a Wikipedia article on CapMetro Rail.

Paternoster Lifts and Safety Regulations

Last week my wife and I took a short trip to New Orleans to see the National World War II Museum.  While that institution is full of old technology, I'd like instead to remark on a venerable device I saw not at the museum, but in the parking garage used by the hotel we stayed at downtown. 

 

Folks in "NO" have a different attitude toward old technology than you might find in a forward-looking place like Austin.  For example, on a walk we took on the way to supper one evening, we passed a fenced parking lot.  Just sitting on a grassy area inside the fence were two antique mechanical artifacts, probably left there because they were too heavy to move when the building they were in was torn down.  One was a drum winch and electric motor for an elevator, and the other was a rusty two-cylinder York refrigeration compressor, about four feet high.  In Austin these things would have been hauled away for scrap value decades ago, but somebody decided just to leave them there, maybe for other NO residents to puzzle out what they were.

 

Maybe something of this same attitude has kept the Paternoster elevator going in the parking garage we used.  A Paternoster elevator uses a string of elevator cars suspended from an endless belt which never stops moving.  The elevator compartments just move slowly up or down past each landing, and to use it, you simply step on as one is passing your floor and step off again when you get where you're going.  If you miss your floor, I suppose you can just ride over the top and down again in some types, but then again, maybe not.

 

Paternoster elevators were popular in the early years of the 20th century, especially in Europe where space and funding for new construction was hard to come by, but safety concerns have led to many of them being replaced by conventional elevators in many countries.  That isn't the case for the one I saw, however.

 

This one was more technically called a "belt manlift."  A rubber-coated belt about eighteen inches (0.4 meters) wide traveled around a rotating drum or pulley fastened to the ground floor.  Every six or seven feet (~2 m) there was a steel handhold and a triangular footstand jutting out from the belt.  To use the device to go up, you grabbed a handhold as it was rising past you, stepped onto the footstand, and hung on till it lifted you to your floor.  Then you jumped off.  There were footstands facing the other way for going down.

 

I say "you" colloquially, although the device was behind a locked chain-link cage and intended only for the use of valets who were parking cars.  I don't think it was ever intended for use by ordinary untrained drivers, but the garage was so old, it may have been at one time.  On our last day there, I had the privilege of seeing a young black man in the act of arriving on the ground floor on the manlift.  Once he got off safely and emerged from the cage, I asked him, "You ever have trouble with that elevator?"

 

He paused for a second and said, "Sometimes.  Quite an antique!" 

 

While there are conical plastic guard rings around each hole that the belt goes through from floor to floor, you can easily imagine what could go wrong with either the elevator-car Paternoster or the belt manlift.  When I finally found out after an Internet search what the thing was called, I wondered if it got its name because every time you used it you said a prayer ("Pater noster . . . ").  (Actually, it's from the device's vague resemblance to rosary beads.) 

 

The Wikipedia article on Paternosters says that many countries have banned them altogether because of accidents, some fatal, which typically happen either to children or elderly people.  The valets who use the one I saw are not in these categories. 

 

The way safety customs and regulations change with time is a reflection of larger trends that happen so slowly they are hard to notice.  But these changes go on at different rates in different countries, and even in different parts of the same country, as I've mentioned.  Without doing any research, I'm pretty sure there are no Paternoster elevators or belt manlifts in any Austin parking garages.  The safety inspectors wouldn't put up with it.

 

But why do you find one in New Orleans?  There is no way to be sure, but it may be part of the same attitude toward the past that leaves old refrigeration compressors sitting in parking lots.  Or it may be that the kinds of people who use the belt manlift are not in a position to complain that it's dangerous.  There was that little pause the valet made before he answered my question.  He was probably figuring out that this old guy holding a camera was a tourist, and whatever he said wouldn't get back to anybody important, so it was okay to be frank with him. 

 

At any given time, a culture has a finite amount of resources to expend on new construction and on fixing up old construction.  If that parking garage was about to collapse in an obvious way, I expect the city authorities would have shut it down, or at least insisted on repairs.  But the fact that it has an old and somewhat dangerous belt manlift for the convenience of the valets hasn't seemed to exercise the powers that be to the extent of having it shut down and making the valets take the stairs like I did.  After all, it's behind a cage, there's a big sign explaining that nobody can use it without training, there's a pair of ropes next to the belt you can yank on to stop the motor, and the valets seem to want the convenience enough to put up with the hazards. 

 

But some time or other, the parking garage will get torn down, and the belt manlift will go with it, unless the future owner decides to keep the big pulley on display as a mute memorial to outdated technology that one era thought was safe enough, and the next thought was too dangerous to use.

 

Sources:  I referred to the Wikipedia articles "Paternoster lift" and "Belt manlift."  The parking garage in question is near the corner of Gravier Street and Camp Street in downtown New Orleans. 

The Future of U. S. Energy: More like Texas or Germany?

 

In an article in the August issue of National Review, Mario Loyola warns of a looming energy crisis in the U. S. that would be largely self-inflicted.  Stated simply, it's a case of increasing demand and decreasing supply of reliable power.

 

First, the increasing demand.  For many years, it looked like the future of electric power in the U. S. was one of slow growth, mainly because the increased efficiency of traditional power-hungry industries such as manufacturing was combining with the overall transition to a service economy to create a situation in which we were doing more every year with only slight increases in power consumption. 

 

That is no longer the case.  And one of the big reasons is a new type of industry:  server farms.  The explosion in demand for computing power for novel applications such as artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency mining is now one of the biggest growth sectors for electric power.  Loyola says electricity demand will grow by at least 15% by 2032, only eight years from now. 

 

How are we going to meet that demand?  Right now, nobody knows.  From an economic point of view, building new power plants is a long-term process.  Investors want to be sure that the billions they put into new plants are going to pay off profitably during the lifetime of the equipment.  That requires, among other things, a stable regulatory environment.  But electric power is one of the most heavily regulated and perversely subsidized industries around.

 

The perverse subsidies right now are all in favor of renewable energy such as solar and wind power.  The reason for this is not economic as much as it is ideological.  A substantial and powerful political sector would like nothing better than to see all fossil-fuel facilities tossed into the ocean (except for the pollution that would cause) or otherwise banished from the planet.  We won't go into the well-known reasons for the hatred of fossil fuels here, but the fact of the matter is that if all fossil-fuel facilities vanished tomorrow, most of us in the U. S. would die in a matter of weeks. 

 

The result of all these incentives is that the "interconnection queue," which is kind of a waiting list that the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission keeps for prospective generating facilities, is currently 95% solar power, and hardly anyone seems to be planning new natural-gas or nuclear plants. 

 

No matter what politicians say, you get no power from solar or wind on a windless night, of which there are many during the year.  And it is still largely true that we can't store large amounts of energy in batteries, although about 4 GW of battery capacity is now on the grid.  For comparison, the total generating capacity available in the U. S. in 2022 was over 1,600 GW.  That's 0.25% of our total capacity.  To get it up to even 10% would require 40 times as much storage as we have now, and we won't get there for years, even if we could afford it.

 

For the foreseeable future (which feels like it's shorter all the time), a reliable, dispatchable power grid will need to have at least a majority of its power coming from sources you can turn on and off whenever you want.  Right now that means nuclear, gas, and (pardon the expression) coal-fired plants.  But for various mainly ideological reasons, coal-fired plants are getting as scarce as DVD rental stores, and nuclear is under both a political cloud and subject to extremely encumbering regulations, as are most types of power infrastructure, even renewable-energy ones. 

 

In a separate article in the same issue, author Dominic Pino points out that the only U. S. industry largely free of any kind of regulation is the tech sector, meaning software-websites-social-media stuff.  Any activity that needs large numbers of people working for it, large amounts of stuff on land, or large amounts of imports runs into a forest of regulatory trees that requires years of bushwhacking to get through—except for tech.  And what industry is doing famously well compared to all the others?  Don't ask.

 

Even tech needs power, though, and if we keep going the way we're going, we will end up like Germany, which made the politically favored but empirically stupid decision a few years ago to shutter all its perfectly good nuclear plants.  So now Germany depends for its energy largely on natural-gas plants running off Russian gas, which is like chickens buying chicken feed from the fox.  Experts at the Harvard International Review attribute Germany's lackluster economic performance the last few years to its extremely high energy prices, which in turn result from slow growth even in the renewables sector and bureaucratic barnacles on the ship of state.

 

On the other hand, Texas, with its famously independent electrical grid, is going ahead with plans to add a lot of dispatchable power in the forms of natural gas and possibly even nuclear energy.  Texas A&M (still fondly known as Aggies despite the fact that the agricultural school is dwarfed by high-tech engineering these days) is planning to build not one, but several small nuclear power plants right on their campus in West Bryan.  Governor Abbott likes to do news releases every time a generating firm announces plans to build new power plants, whether it's natural gas, nuclear, or something else.  Just one recent announcement from his office stated that 42 new gigawatts of power was being planned by one firm, which goes a long way toward getting us to the 150 GW or so that Loyola says Texas will need by 2030.

 

And while I chilled out along with everyone else during the February 2021 Texas cold-weather grid failure, which might not have been as bad if Texas's grid wasn't independent of the rest of the country, that same independence makes it easier to plan new capacity in Texas than anywhere else in the country, where the Environmental Protection Agency and other bureaucratic blockades slow the process. 

 

So which shall it be?  A stagnant, energy-starved, but green economy?  Or energy enough to power all those electric cars that people allegedly want to drive, and the AI server farms, and maybe even some old-fashioned hands-on factories that we've almost forgotten how to build?  The choice is pretty clear, although energy policy doesn't rank very high on this year's political agenda.  But it's something that affects the lives of everyone in these United States, which makes it inevitably political.  And I only hope that the political process can handle it in a way that at least doesn't do a lot of harm.

 

Sources:  Mario Loyola's article "Our Coming Energy Famine" appeared on pp. 23-25 of the August 2024 issue of National Review.  I also referred to the websites https://www.utilitydive.com/news/entergy-proposes-gas-fired-power-plants-1200-MW/718036/, https://hir.harvard.edu/germanys-energy-crisis-europes-leading-economy-is-falling-behind/, https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/electricity/electricity-in-the-us-generation-capacity-and-sales.php, and https://wtaw.com/small-nuclear-power-plants-to-be-built-on-the-rellis-campus/.

Medical Nanomachines: Potential Boon or Bane?

 

One of the more unlikely premises for a movie was the idea behind the 1966 film Fantastic Voyage.  A scientist who plays a crucial role in the Cold War is stricken by a blood clot, and his own invention—a way to shrink objects to microscopic size for only an hour—is applied to a submarine full of people who then travel through his bloodstream to save him. 

 

Science fiction has a way of becoming reality, and while nobody has yet figured out how to shrink people and submarines, a recent New Yorker profile of the work of chemist James Tour and his colleagues describes microscopic light-powered jackhammers that can penetrate bacteria cell walls. 

 

In the first place, living cells are fantastically complex machines in their own right, so there is nothing intrinsically new about tiny machines.  The innovation claimed by Tour and his team is that they have developed a way to control the action of tiny jackhammer-like molecules by irradiating them with a specific wavelength of near-infrared light.  The molecules have what are called plasmons in them.  The details are complicated, but basically the plasmon acts like a kind of molecular tuning fork that resonates at one particular wavelength.  When light of that wavelength hits the molecule, it absorbs a great deal of energy and begins to vibrate vigorously, punching a hole in the bacterial wall and initiating the bacteria's demise.  And in contrast to shorter wavelengths of light in the visible range, near-infrared light can penetrate an inch or two into the body, allowing access to fairly deep regions under the skin.

 

So far, no human tests have been done.  Some moth larvae in Tour's lab have been treated with molecular jackhammers to save them from a terrible death from MRSA bacteria, but that's about it so far.  Years of testing with increasingly complicated organisms—mice, pigs, and so on—lies ahead before any practical applications to humans can be expected.  And there may be some bump in the road ahead that will prevent this technology from finding any application in humans at all.  But so far it looks promising, and I'm sure Prof. Tour will have no problem finding funding for more research, and commercial applications too if he's interested.

 

The article's author Dhruv Khullar mentions that some researchers are concerned about the inherent dangers of molecular machines.  He describes the "gray-goo" problem posed by an early futurist, K. Eric Drexler, who speculated that if a nanomachine was programmed to turn every living thing into more of itself, it might infect the whole biosphere.  This reminds me of what happened to some goldfish my mother bought us when we were kids, after giving in to our continual begging for them.  The fish were fine for a while, but one morning we got up and instead of goldfish, there were just floating lumps of whitish gunk in the tank.  She got rid of the aquarium soon after that, and we never had any more fish unless they were cooked first.

 

Tour's devices don't seem to pose such a hazard, because without the special near-IR wavelength of light shining on them, they don't do anything.  So that seems to be a pretty safe way to control them, unless you start speculating about how you might sneak some molecular jackhammers into a victim's drink, and then take them into a room bathed with the requisite wavelength of near-IR light, which is invisible, of course.  And there you go with another science-fiction suspense film.

 

It seems to me that activities such as Tour's are pretty harmless compared to, for instance, tinkering with existing coronaviruses with gain-of-function research.  For whatever reason, nature has produced (or God has allowed, depending on your point of view) some really nasty viruses that use mechanical means to take over cells and turn them into virus factories, with the byproduct of making the host ill or dead.  I was unable to locate the details, but someone once told me that the rabies virus is precisely designed with a kind of spear that penetrates neurons to infect them.  So in developing his molecular jackhammers, Prof. Tour isn't inventing as much as he is co-opting a technique and powering it by other means, namely light waves.  And arranging things so that the molecules can't do anything without external illumination is a nice fail-safe feature that allows the researcher to exert control.

 

This work is only one example of the discoveries scientists and engineers can make when provided with enough resources and cultural favor.  Not every country in the world is hospitable to scientific research of this type.  And it takes money and smart people, which are both limited resources.  We should not take such activities for granted, because they don't happen automatically.  It's easy to assume that medical technology will just keep on advancing on its own without anybody other than the researchers paying much attention. 

 

But there is a big threat to all U. S.-government-funded research looming on the horizon.  While the U. S. has never experienced a fiscal crisis such as the one that struck Germany in the early 1920s, nothing says we are immune from it.  As interest rates rise and the population ages, two money sinks—interest on the national debt and entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare—threaten to take over the Federal budget and squeeze out just about everything else.  While private funding has increasingly taken up the slack vacated by declining government support for research, it's hard to imagine a healthy private sector persisting if the government has gone bankrupt. 

 

And such events are not that predictable.  Neither major political party currently has the intestinal fortitude to address this issue with anything near the seriousness it deserves.  As things stand, there is still enough research money available to support impressive efforts such as the things Prof. Tour and his group are doing.  But if we are to see any practical benefits from it, there are years of work ahead, work that somebody has to do and somebody else has to pay for.  Smart young people will have to decide that research is worth doing, and the public will have to decide that it's worth paying for, and worth having a fiscally sound government to pay for it.  So far, it's all working, but whatever can't go on forever eventually has to stop.

 

Sources:  The New Yorker of June 24, 2024 carried Dhruv Khullar's article "Small Wonder" on pp. 20-23.  I also referred to a Rice University post on Prof. Tour's research at https://news.rice.edu/news/2023/molecular-jackhammers-good-vibrations-eradicate-cancer-cells

and Wikipedia articles on plasmons and molecular machines. 

 

Seeing the Unseen in "Inside Out 2"

 

I promise this is not going to turn into a movie-review column.  But the new Pixar release "Inside Out 2" does what it does so well that I think it deserves some positive attention, and without CGI-powered technology a movie like this simply wouldn't be possible.  The thing it does well is to turn dusty abstractions into solid-looking realities that are vivid, memorable, and understandable.  And that's not easy.

 

In case you missed both the original "Inside Out" in 2015 and this year's just-released sequel, here is the basic setup.  Riley is a young girl (pre-teen at first, just turned 13 in the present film) who faces some stresses in her life that by themselves are fairly common and unremarkable:  enduring a move from the Midwest to the West Coast, playing competitive hockey, and generally dealing with adolescent crises.  So far, so dull.  But you, the movie viewer, are privileged to see what goes on in Riley's mind.  Not her brain, her mind—that's an important distinction.

 

The "Inside Out" films are perhaps some of the most philosophically sophisticated and yet successful movies ever made, because they portray abstractions—the technical philosophical word is "concepts"—in a way that is not only accessible but entertaining to virtually anybody old enough to understand English (or whatever other language the foreign export versions are dubbed into).  In the first film, we meet Joy, Anger, Fear, and Sadness, each voiced by a top professional actor and matched by characters designed to remind you of their nature at every moment.  Sadness is a small, rounded, blue, bespectacled woman, and Anger is a stocky, bright-red guy who literally blows his top like a blowtorch at the slightest provocation. 

 

The conceit that inside our minds there is a tiny being at the "controls" of our body is an old one, and the Pixar writers show the various emotions at Riley's control panel, so that when Sadness takes over, we see Riley crying, for example.  The film vividly portrays metaphorical phrases such as "back of the mind," "train of thought," and "stream of consciousness" in ways that are both logical and funny as all getout. 

 

But the movies are more than just bad puns realized with millions of dollars' worth of digital graphics.  Lisa Damour, one of the psychologists who served as a consultant during the sequel's production, has written a book on the the anxiety epidemic that teenagers, especially girls, are experiencing these days.  Interviewed by Slate, she said that "Inside Out 2" can help teenagers and their parents understand that unpleasant emotions like anxiety are not simply bad and to be avoided at all costs, but instead have an important role to play as long as they don't completely take over. 

 

The Slate reviewer credits the original "Inside Out" with helping him change the way he relates to his own children, and the new film has the potential to do that and more for both teenagers suffering from anxiety and their parents trying to help them. 

 

I would go farther than simply saying that the movie can help teenagers and their parents therapeutically.  I would say that it's a strong proponent of realism in a culture that has embraced nominalism and idealism for way too long.

 

In under a thousand words, nominalism is the idea that there are not really ideas, just names.  And idealism starts from thought and tries to get to things afterwards.  Carried to their logical conclusions, these philosophies often terminate in nihilism, the belief that life has no meaning.  The Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor once said that because we "breathe in" nihilism in the modern world, we tend not to notice it, just as a fish doesn't notice it's in water.  But the tendency to reduce human life to only that which is scientifically verifiable—biochemistry and neural impulses, basically—is all around us, and probably lies at the root of manifold modern pathologies.

 

"Inside Out 2" flies in the face of all this by making non-material concepts such as emotions, memories, and the sense of self into concrete, visible, and even entertaining realities.  No, there is not really a little red-felt homonculus running around in my brain whenever I get mad.  But anger is a real emotion, as real as hatred, fear, or love.  And to pretend, as many scientists do, that anger is only a certain combination of neural activity and hormones is not just perverse, it's incorrect and incomplete. 

 

It's appropriate that Pixar is a division of Disney, because with such films Disney continues its tradition of making what I would call benevolent propaganda films for traditional family values.  Consider the title of "Whistle While You Work," a song written originally for the studio's 1937 animated feature "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs."  The song's theme is what all responsible parents want their children to learn:  life is full of work, so you might as well enjoy it.  In dramatizing an emotional and ethical struggle experienced by the barely-teenage Riley that could take up many paragraphs in a learned treatise on the maturing of the concept of the self in adolescent girls, but doing it in a way that I hope millions of people will pay to watch, Pixar has done a great service in the cause of realism, philosophically speaking.

 

And historically, moderate realism has been the preferred philosophy of the Roman Catholic Church, as well as most other Christian denominations.  I seriously doubt that many of the thousands of people working on "Inside Out 2" consider themselves evangelists, and nobody is going to literally come to Jesus simply as a direct result of the film.  But anything that moves large numbers of people away from the nihilist world view and gets them to believe that abstractions such as anger, fear, and love are real things—in some sense, more real than the atoms we are made of—is preparing the ground for actual evangelism, whether the filmmakers realize it or not.  And for my money, that's a good thing.

 

Sources:  The article entitled "Inside Out 2 Takes On the Teen Mental Health Crisis.  Does It Suggest the Right Solution?" appeared on the website of Slate on June 14, 2024 at https://slate.com/culture/2024/06/inside-out-2-disney-pixar-movie-anxiety-teens.html.  Flannery O'Connor describes modern nihilism as a gas in a letter to "A." as quoted at https://yirt-studies.livejournal.com/40496.html.  "Inside Out 2" is currently in U. S. release nationwide. 

I, Robot, Th. D.

 

For those unfamiliar with academic titles, Th. D. stands for Doctor Theologiae, a doctorate degree in theology.  So far to my knowledge, robots or algorithms have not yet been awarded any advanced degree, let alone one in theology.  But an article on the website of the journal of religion and society First Things got me thinking about how algorithms can distort our sense of the sacred.

 

Author Grayson Quay notes that many people subscribe to Bible phone apps that provide the user with a verse for the day.  The more popular apps evidently provide verses that have been shared or tweeted the most by the people using the app.  In this way, the well-known echo-chamber effect that has plagued recent political discourse so much has found its way into the spiritual lives of millions. 

 

The problem is that just because a verse gets tweeted a lot, that doesn't mean it's the best verse to read at a given time, or at any time.  The natural result of this process is that people using the verse-of-the-day app will see mainly verses that other people have felt like sharing. 

 

If you examine your own motives for sharing anything online, you will probably find desires such as to (a) impress other people with your perceptiveness or cleverness, (b) amuse other people with something you thought was funny, or (c) create a reaction that can be summarized as "Oh, ain't it awful."  None of these motives mesh well with Bible verses, at least not without some help.  One can make jokes with them, but they are generally humorous to the extent that they are not spiritual and vice-versa.

 

Quay claims that the popularity filter used by social-media algorithms will exclude everything that isn't of a feel-good quality.  For instance, I doubt that Psalm 137:9 will make it:  "Happy is the one who seizes your infants/ And dashes them against the rocks."  Imagine if the algorithm sent that to the mother of a newborn.  But if you try to remedy the situation by making the algorithm send verses truly at random rather than basing them on popularity, you're bound to get ham-handed incidents like that from time to time.

 

As ethical problems go, the comparative fatuity of Bible-app verses is not that serious.  But what is serious is the way we are turning over all kinds of things that used to be done by humans, into the unfeeling hands of what amounts to robots.  And we are doing it without examining the big changes that can result.

 

Every choice has a basis or cause behind it, and the basis has a philosophy.  If you make a Bible-verse app choose randomly from among a set of carefully selected verses that go through a long cycle, say lasting three years, you have what amounts to the Lectionary Cycle idea of public Bible readings used by Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and a number of other liturgical Christian churches, who got the idea in turn from Jewish practices.  This system is based on the notion that the Bible is God's word, and we fallible forgetful humans need to be reminded of all of it from time to time.  It's a good system and has been used for hundreds of years.

 

On the other hand, if you go with the social-media approach and share only those Bible verses that have been shared or tweeted a lot already, you employ a philosophy that prioritizes hits and click volume.  If you're running an online business, that's the kind of philosophy to use, but popularity is not the exclusive or even main goal of Christian ministry or discipleship. 

 

While it's true that if you are so repellent that nobody listens to what you're saying, you will do nobody any good, even Jesus himself said things that proved so confusing or unpopular that he lost a good deal of what we would now call market share.  But under the assumption that Jesus made no mistakes in his ministry, those were the right things to say at the time.

 

This topic comes close to home, because for some years I have been choosing Bible verses to prompt a weekly discussion group of Christian faculty members at my university.  No, I have never picked Psalm 137:9 for the topic of discussion, although I think highly enough of my colleagues that they would probably get something good out of it.  My goal has been to choose verses that relate to issues or problems that Christian instructors commonly face.  We are humans first and instructors second, of course, so some of the topics just relate to our common humanity.  Some verses prove more successful at starting good discussions than others do, but success as such is not necessarily my goal. 

 

The point is that I try to customize the selections to suit my particular audience, and to challenge them as much as amuse or entertain or please them.  The operators of most social media dread true challenges to their audiences as the plague, because the metaphorical off switch is always handy, and once a subscriber drops an app, it hurts market share, which is the true bottom line for commercial apps, and possibly for many Bible apps too. 

 

In Acts 20:27, in his parting words St. Paul tells the Ephesians that he has given them "the whole counsel of God."  This says to me that he didn't hold back on the hard and difficult and challenging parts, as well as the reassuring parts of Scripture and teaching. 

 

The principle here is that we should listen to what is good for us, not just to what pleases us.  And that principle has a much broader application than merely to Bible-verse apps.  The customizing of news and other information to increase user engagement has been simultaneously one of the greatest innovations in commercial media, and one of the most insidious cultural shifts as well, a shift that has had widespread, profound, but largely invisible and hard-to-trace effects.  While church attenders have the Lectionary to counteract the effects of echo-chamber Bible apps, the rest of the world has surrendered happily to its echo-chamber world, and the world is suffering the consequences.

 

Sources:  Grayson Quay's article "Algorithmic Spirituality" can be found on the First Things website at https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/06/algorithmic-spirituality. 

 

Good News for America's Power Grid—Mostly

 

I've been rather negative in this space lately, partly because engineering ethics tends to focus on things that go wrong.  So today I'm going to write about something that the federal government is doing that is mostly right, or at least could turn out that way, depending on how it's done.

 

Last Tuesday, May 28, the Biden administration announced a federal-state initiative aimed at improving the nation's power grid.  Called the "Federal-State Modern Grid Deployment Initiative," it is a grab-bag of funded projects, coordination initiatives, and regulatory changes that share a common theme:  making the country's power grid more up to date and efficient. 

 

Twenty-one states are participating in this initial rollout, and all I'll say about that is that my native and current home state of Texas is not one of them.  Ever since World War II, Texas has operated its power grid more or less independently from the rest of the U. S., so it's not surprising that the state decided to pass on this opportunity for federal collaboration too.  But that won't keep Texas from doing the same sorts of things that are being encouraged by the initiative.

 

One item that caught my eye concerns a backing-off of environmental regulations.  It turns out that, according to the White House press release itself, if a power company wants to merely upgrade an existing transmission line longer than 20 miles, they have to suffer through submitting a detailed environmental review under the National Environmental Policy Act.  This sort of thing can take years, and this is one disincentive that has discouraged grid operators from upgrading their lines.  Well, as part of the grid initiative, the government is now allowing companies to do the "simplest form" of environmental review.  Whether they can put it on a postcard is unclear, but it looks like an improvement, at least on paper. 

 

Another part of the initiative encourages transmission-line operators to "reconductor" their lines, with financial incentives that up to now have been lacking.  If a given region needs more power delivered, a grid operator has two choices:  either build more transmission lines into the area, or upgrade existing lines with what are called "advanced conductors."  Traditional power transmission lines—the high-voltage ones supported on the big steel towers—consist of a core of steel strands for strength surrounded by aluminum strands that do the conducting.  Even at the low frequency of 60 Hz, most of the current flows on the outer regions of such a conductor, so the poorly-conducting steel in the middle doesn't cause too many losses, although it does contribute some.

 

Well, advanced conductor technology that is apparently a few decades old can increase the maximum carrying capacity of a transmission line.  The steel core is replaced by composite materials (carbon or ceramic fibers in some cases), and the plain round wire-drawn aluminum is replaced by annealed aluminum trapezoids, which somehow work better.  The overall result is that you can carry two to three times the maximum load with advanced conductors compared to the traditional ones.

 

Why haven't so-called "reconductoring" projects been carried out much until now?  Partly because of a perverse disincentive built into the funding structure of how electric utilities operate in the U. S.  Many funding formulas allow the companies to be reimbursed as a fraction of their total investment.  It's cheaper to reconductor an existing line than to build an entirely new transmission line, so up to now many grid operators have been choosing the more expensive route to maximize their allowed return on investment.  The federal grid initiative has money and regulatory features designed to even the playing field so that it will make more economic sense to replace older conductors with newer, more efficient ones, rather than cluttering up the landscape with new transmission lines over different routes, along with all the environmental hassles which new lines involve.

 

I suspect the Biden administration was hoping that its environment-friendly constituents were looking the other way during the announcement of this initiative, because most of the time it has pushed for more environmental regulation, not less.  But the whole thing is being sold as a big step toward the overarching goal of "tackling the climate crisis," meaning converting the grid to renewables.  And certainly we need more transmission-grid capacity to deal with the odd places that large lumps of power are showing up, mostly in the sunny, windy West, while most of the energy is needed in the soggy, cloudy North and East. 

 

Two critical technical issues were not mentioned in the press release for the initiative, although they may have been addressed somewhere in the fine print.  One is the vulnerability of our power grid to the unlikely but potentially devastating effects of either a strong geomagnetic storm or a nuclear-bomb-triggered electromagnetic pulse.  I understand that relatively simple and inexpensive measures could be taken now to make the grid much more resilient against such events, but as the power companies have no financial incentive to install them, they mostly haven't.

 

The other issue concerns grid stability.  It turns out that the typical solar or wind farm is a "grid-following" installation, in that it takes its cue from the grid's AC voltage and just follows along with it.  As long as such grid-following sources are a small percentage of the total power coming into the grid, there is no problem and the power gets used like any other source of power would.  But if too many followers crowd out the conventional spinning-turbine grid leaders, the whole grid gets unstable and is likely to collapse in the case of sudden shocks such as the loss of a large chunk of power.  There is a way to fix this:  to make renewable sources pretend to be spinning-turbine sources.  But it costs more, and nobody installing just one additional renewable source is going to want to spend that kind of money.

 

Perhaps such global concerns will come up in the coordinating meetings that the federal initiative will hold, and they'll address those issues too.  Even if they don't, it looks like this is a government initiative which is actually likely to produce solid benefits, even if it's technical and rather boring to the average citizen.  But engineers are used to being viewed that way, and these days I think we can use some low-drama good news in the public sector for a change.

 

Sources:  I referred to the White House news release issued on May 28 at https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2024/05/28/fact-sheet-biden-harris-administration-launches-federal-state-initiative-to-bolster-americas-power-grid/,  a Nebraska Examiner article at https://nebraskaexaminer.com/2024/05/29/21-states-join-biden-administration-in-bid-to-modernize-nations-aging-grid/, and an item on reconductoring in Forbes at https://www.forbes.com/sites/energyinnovation/2024/04/09/reconductoring-could-help-solve-americas-looming-grid-problems/?sh=25cea40828de.

The Seoul AI Summit: Serious Safety Progress or Window-Dressing?

 

Last Tuesday, representatives from the world's heavy hitters in "artificial intelligence" (AI) made a public pledge at a mini-summit in Seoul, South Korea to make sure AI develops safely.  Google, Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Meta (of which Facebook and other social-media platforms are a part), and OpenAI all agreed on voluntary safety precautions, even to the extent of cutting off systems that present extreme risks.

 

This isn't the first time we've seen such apparent unanimity on the part of companies that otherwise act like rivals.  This meeting was actually a followup to a larger one last November in Bletchley Park, England, at which a "Bletchley Declaration" was signed.  I haven't read it, but reportedly it contains promises about sharing responsibility for AI risks and holding further meetings, such as the one in South Korea last week.

 

Given the cost and time spent by upper executives, we should ask why such events are held in the first place.  One reason could be is that it's an opportunity to generate positive news coverage.  Your company and a lot of others pay lots of money to send prominent people to a particular place where the media would be downright negligent if they didn't cover it.  And whatever differences the firms have outside the meeting, they manage to put up a united front when they sign and announce declarations full of aspirational language like "pledge to cooperate" and "future summits to define further" and so on. 

 

One also has to ask whether such meetings make any difference to the rest of us.  Will AI really be any safer as a result of the Bletchley Declaration or the Seoul summit?  The obvious answer is, in some ways it's too early to tell.

 

Every now and then, a summit that looks like it's mainly for window-dressing publicity and spreading good vibes turns out to have amounted to a genuine advance in the cause it is concerned with.  In 1975, a group of molecular biologists and other biotechnology professionals gathered in Asilomar, California to discuss the ethical status and future of a technology called recombinant DNA.  Out of safety concerns, scientists worldwide had halted such research, and the urgent task of the meeting was to hammer out principles under which research could safely go forward. 

 

The scientists did reach an agreement about what types of research were allowed and what were prohibited.  Among the prohibited types were experiments to clone DNA from highly pathogenic organisms.  It's not clear to me whether this would have stopped the kind of research that went on in the Wuhan laboratories that are suspected of originating COVID-19.  But it would have been nice if it had.

 

Historians of science look back on the Asilomar conference as a new step in bringing safety concerns about science before the public, and in reaching public agreements about rules to follow.  So such summits can do some good.

 

However, there are differences between the 1975 Asilomar meeting and the kinds of meetings held by AI firms in Bletchley Park and Seoul.  For one thing, at Asilomar, the participants were the same people that were doing the work they were talking about, and there weren't that many of them—only about 140 scientists attended.  I seriously doubt that the people at the UK and Korea AI safety meetings were exclusively working AI engineers and scientists, although I could be wrong.  Such technical types rarely have the clout to sign any kind of document committing the entire firm to anything more than buying pencils, let alone making a high-sounding safety pledge.  No, you can rest assured that these were upper-management types, which is probably one reason that the texture of the agreements resembled cotton candy—it looks pretty, it even tastes good, but it's mostly air and there's nothing really substantial to it.

 

My standard response to anyone who asks me whether AI will result in widespread harm is, "It already has."  And then I give my standard example.

 

If you look at how American democracy operated in, say, 1964, and compare it to how it works today, you will note some differences.  Back then, most people got more or less the same news content, which was delivered in carefully crafted forms such as news releases and news conferences.  The news then could be compared to a mass-produced automobile, which went through dozens of hands, inspections, and safety checks before being delivered to the consumer.

 

Today, on the other hand, news comes in little snippets written by, well, anybody who wants to write them.  Huge complicated diplomatic issues are dealt with by the digital equivalent of throwing little handwritten notes out the window.  And everybody gets a different customized version of reality, designed not to inform but to inflame and inspire clicks, with factual accuracy being down between priorities number 20 and 30 of the list of priorities internalized by the same firms we saw gathering last week in Seoul. 

 

The results of the deep embedding of what amounts to AI (with a small fraction of the work being done by humans) in social media are all around us:  a dysfunctional government that has lost most of whatever respect from the public it ever had; an electoral process that has delivered two of the least-liked presidential candidates in over a century; and a younger generation which is the most unhappy, fragile, and pessimistic one in decades. 

 

While it is true that AI is not exclusively responsible for these ills, it is inextricably implicated in them.

 

For the heck of it, I will wind up this piece with a Latin quotation:  Si monumentum requiris circumspice.  It means "If you seek his monument, look around you."  It is engraved on the tombstone of Sir Christopher Wren, the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, where he is buried.  We can apply the same phrase to the workings of AI as it has been applied to social media.  Instead of holding meetings that issue noble-sounding broad declarations of pledges to develop AI safely, I would be a lot more convinced of the firms' sincerity if they put together a lot of working engineers and scientists and told them to fix what has already been broken.  But that would mean they would first have to admit they broke it, and they don't want to do that.

 

Sources:  An Associated Press article on the Seoul AI Safety mini-summit appeared at https://apnews.com/article/south-korea-seoul-ai-summit-uk-2cc2b297872d860edc60545d5a5cf598.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on "Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA" and Christopher Wren.