I’d like to interrupt the recent stream of political posts for a moment to geek over the prospects of robotic automobiles. Well, not quite; there will be a bit of political grumbling before the end, and there are a few mixed feelings about the technology. But first–the robots!

DETROIT, April 3 — The modern car does not have to guess your weight. It already knows.

It watches how you drive and it can pull a Trump. Skid, and before you can blink, you’re fired — the car is driving for you, if only for a moment. Cars today can decide when to brake, steer and can park themselves. They can even see.

In short, the back-seat driver now lives under the hood. And it does more than just talk.

This is all technology on the road now, if not in a single country or car. But industry engineers and executives view it as the start of a trend that will play out over the next decade, in which automobiles become increasingly in touch with their surroundings and able to act autonomously.

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Diminishing returns from air bags and other devices that help people survive crashes have led to a wave of new technology to help avoid accidents. Or, if an on-board microprocessor judges a collision to be inevitable, the car puts itself into a defensive crouch. Mercedes S-Class sedans will even start shutting the sunroof and lifting reclined seats if a collision is deemed likely.

This trend is made possible by the car’s evolution from a mechanical device to an increasingly computerized one, in which electronic impulses replace or augment moving parts. That means microprocessors can take control of the most basic driving functions, like steering and braking.

At the same time, there is a parallel evolution in sensory technology. Most advanced safety systems are equipped with sensors that look inside the car, tracking tire rotation, brake pressure and how rapidly a driver is turning the steering wheel.

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Japanese automakers have pushed the boundaries of these technologies farthest in their home market, a society with an affinity for gadgetry. Toyota recently introduced a car that parks itself.

I love gadgets. And while I like having a car available, I hate the routine unpleasantness that goes along with driving most places you need to get. A self-parking car is just so tomorrow–and so nice a solution to one of the more routine frustrations of driving, that it will leave my geeky soul all a-glow for weeks.

I do have to confess, though, that the glow wears off a little when I think about it more. Sure, I’m all for intelligent machines–and robots, no less! And sure, I think that increased road safety is all for the best. But–as Thomas Landauer pointed out back in 1996 in The Trouble With Computers–all too often we end up wasting a lot of productive energy by investing it in sophisticated technological solutions to problems that were created by the inappropriate application of technology in the first place. Landauer discusses this in the context of uncritical transfer of tasks to the computer; but it’s no less true of transportation.

Think of it this way: the reason that people are working on sophisticated robo-cars is because when you have millions of people individually driving cars on crowded streets at high speeds, it makes it all too likely that a lot of people will crash into each other and get killed. One way to do this is to pour a lot of technological effort into making the cars more aware of their surroundings and able to automatically take actions that will reduce the likelihood of a crash, and reduce the damage if one occurs.

Another way to get cars to carry a lot of people without running into each other is to tie a bunch of them together, move them as a unit, and call it a train.

But trains have floundered over the past century while automobiles have flourished. Why? Well, not because stressful, dangerous, polluting, rage-inducing car commutes are really how the average person wants to get from place to place; it has a lot more to do with the fact that the various levels of government in the United States have effectively forced us to adopt automobiles as our method of mass transit through creating a cartelized financial disaster-area in the train industry, and by pouring billions of dollars every year into subsidies for creating and maintaining free highways.

Don’t get me wrong. I wish I had the resources to get myself one of those self-parking cars. I think a future filled with robo-mobiles is one I’d like to live in. But I also appreciate a simple solution to what ought to be a simple problem. So two cheers for robo-cars, and one boo held back for the Interstate Highway System.

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled jeremiads against the Bush Administration.

So, it’s official. I’m a Bachelor.

Saturday I graduated from Auburn University, with a B.A. in Philosophy (with a Computer Science minor tacked on for good measure). After the past few years of wandering the halls of learning (or, at least, the halls of Haley Center), I finally have to figure out a new gig. Usually at this point, someone makes some remark or another about leaving the bubble of the academy and being thrown out into the terrible freedom of the real world. You won’t hear it from me, though, for a couple of reasons.

First, I’ve been inhabiting the real world all along. I mean this in the truistic sense–Auburn University campus is no more illusory and no less material than the rest of the world–but I mean it in a deeper sense too. When people talk about school as not being part of the real world, they seem to have one of two things in mind (or, more likely, both). On the one hand, there is a particular picture of what academics do and how it relates to the world. The idea is that you’re dealing with the fabric of reality only when you’re in the midst of an active, practical life–that academics aren’t worldly wise enough to hack it in such a life–that the world of the academy doesn’t (and can’t) deal in experiential reality, because its whole purpose is to think rather than to do. On the other hand, there is a particular attitude towards school: it’s not part of the real world because it bears no deep relationship to what you intend to do with your life. At best, it’s a preparatory means, valuable purely instrumentally–it’s something that you do in order to get into a socio-economic position where you can strike off and do whatever it is that constitutes your real life–a career, a family, or what have you. At worst, it’s merely a holding pen where you wait around until you’re ready to go off the parental dole and get started on the real part of your life. The second picture is usually a direct result of the first. Going to school isn’t part of the real part of your life because the real part of your life consists of doing things, not of thinking about them.

I don’t want to deny that the second picture is an accurate empirical theory about how most people think of college in this day and age. But I think it is a pernicious picture if it is taken as a guide for how ought to spend your school years; those who act on a picture like that have basically been wasting their time and money for the past 4 years. It’s by no means necessary (however often it may be actual) for school to be cut off from the serious part of your life; such a dichotomy rests, I think, on a notion of the academic life that is completely false.

What I mean is this: in most other civilized times, we would hardly feel any need to defend the validity of the vita contemplativa, or the value of the way I’ve spent the past four years–learning and wrestling with important problems, for the sake of nothing except thought itself and knowledge of the truth. That is no small part of what I want to do with my life and to contribute to the world. The relationship between doing and thinking isn’t antagonism, or parasitism. Humans are rational animals; the very essence of how we live our lives is that we put thought into action, that thinking and doing are (for us) two sides of one coin. (Doing without thinking, in any literal and sustained sense, is a form of madness–indeed, a form of inhumanity.) So while I’m done being an undergraduate, my life for the past four years hasn’t been mere preparation for what is to follow. I’ve been doing what I want to do all along.

And I intend to keep on doing what I have been doing. But I’m out of school for the next year, and being a freelance academic doesn’t pay very well. So, I will be looking for a job, and working on graduate school applications for the academic year after the upcoming one. (If graduate school doesn’t work out, I might have to become a monk.)

In the meantime, however, I am on vacation. Right now I am reporting from Berea, Kentucky, where I’m visiting my old friend S. with the rest of my gang of friends from high school. S. pulls us into these fascinating conversations about sustainability and renewable energy and culture; we wander around the campus as if it were a swampy May night in Auburn again.

From there, it is a mere 12 hours by Greyhound bus to Detroit, where I will meet with my sweetheart. I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to this–to the theological inside jokes, to talking again about philosophy and movies and the Middle Ages; to just having quiet time together to spend with absolutely nothing else eating time away. We’re heading out on a trans-continental road trip out to California, where the plan is (I think) to sit on the beach, C and talk and read and do as close to absolutely nothing as possible for a few days–then to meander around a few sites in Monterey and San Fransisco. My hope is that I won’t be heading back home until early June.

In any case, the plan from there is: (1) summer work, (2) break, (3) move, and (4) fall work. (1) will consist in serving as a T.A. in Philosophy of Mind for Johns Hopkins University Center for Talented Youth (except I won’t actually be at JHU; I’ll be at a program site in Loudonville, New York). After that I am moving to Ypsilanti, MI, and looking around to find out in what (4) will consist. Wish me luck!

Posting will be sporadic, but I fear that you are more than used to that already, gentle reader. I’ll try and drop a line from time to time, though, and when I get back some changes and updates the the site are in the works.

Ciao!

OK, so I’ve been away for a while, as will be obvious to all three of my loyal readers. I’ve been visiting a lot with my friend L. from Detroit, and also celebrating my 21st birthday, which was yesterday (no alcohol was consumed, but I did have some very inordinately tasty bread pudding).

On Friday, I got to see a very fun, if spotty, production of Hamlet at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The costuming was all over the place–doublets, late Victorian costumes, Norwegian commandos with AK-47s. And, I hate to be catty here, but the actor playing Laertes seemed like a terrible ham until I just realized that he has the misfortunate of this really weird, nasal voice that is really distracting. Max, who we saw at intermission, also pointed out that he disliked the direction of Polonius, who was being played completely buffo, without any of his underlying menace. All true. On the other hand, many of the actors were quite good — in particular, Hamlet (whiich is the important thing, of course), Horatio, Claudius, and Polonius (goofiness aside). And as always, the Shakespeare Festival is just a lovely place to go out for a night and see a play. Even if it were god-awful, I would have enjoyed the drive and sitting outside by the fountain. Yesterday we celebrated my birthday by going to see the fabulous film version of The Importance of Being Earnest at the Capri theatre and having dinner at the Warehouse Bistro in Opelika. And today, we are going to Cold Stone Creamery with Max to hang out and get some very tasty ice cream. All of this, I have to say, has been a lot more entertaining than, say, schlepping down to Bodega’s and giving myself alcohol poisoning with 21 shots.

Anyway, to come to the point of all of this reportage, another nice feature of my birthday weekend was that my mother returned home from Dallas bearing several cheaply-acquired computer goods (Office XP Professional for $60 — having relatives who work for M$ is very nice). So, for the next few days I’ll be working on hot-rodding my computer a bit. New wireless mouse and keyboard are already installed; I’ll be upgrading to Winders XP soon, and I’m going to go out shopping with some of my birthday money to pick up new gadgets to slap on to the system. It should be a pretty geektacular couple of days, so if I’m not around posting for a little while, that’s where I’ll be.

I am scared, honest-to-God scared, about what is happening in this country.

There are no words for the terror, grief, sadness, rage, and pain of the attack on Tuesday. Perhaps 5,000 people dead. Thousands more wounded. All of us paralyzed by the carnage, the gut-wrenching horror, the crime against humanity that unfolded before us on live television, the Internet, the radio, the choking words between friends and strangers.

And now we have begun to react predictably, tragically, terrifyingly, like a beast stung. It had begun already on Tuesday when pols stood on state house and capitol steps all across the country and belted out God Bless America — as if the motherfucking abstract nation-state identity of America were brutally attacked by three exploding jets, rather than 5,000 innocent people. The flags and the yellow ribbons are appearing everywhere. In an unprecedented act of hatred, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell used the 700 Club as a pulpit to blame gays, lesbians, feminists, and secularists for the attacks. I can’t count the number of hateful anti-Muslim or anti-Arab statements I’ve heard person-to-person, or through the mass media. And now the violence has begun. Amateur brownshirts in Chicago had to be turned back by police with machine guns when a mob chanting U-S-A, U-S-A had to be stopped from setting fire to a mosque. A Muslim community center was firebombed. In Detroit, with the largest Arab population in the United States, Muslim centers were subjected to bomb threats and death threats; two young men were arrested after saying they were going down to kill all the Arabs in Dearborn. In Arizona, a Sikh gas station owner was murdered because his turban and beard made him resemble the media portrayal of Arabs.

On the radio I hear Sen. Zell Miller (GA) saying that when we find who is responsible for the attack we should Bomb the hell out of them. If that means collateral damage, so be it. What he doesn’t say is that collateral damage is a polite way of saying mass murder of civilians, and when he tries to justify it by saying that They obviously don’t care about our civilians he forgets that the innocents he is so eager to murder had nothing to do with the atrocity of 9/11/2001. NATO has already invoked the World War III clause of their charter. The hawks of the Right and Left have cried Havoc, and authorized President Bush with a blank check for military force and billions in new defense spending. They are already preparing us for permanent war against an unspecifiable, unlocatable enemy (a war against terrorism), which they have promised to fight through covert means (over 6,000,000 people worldwide have been killed by United States covert operations since World War II) and have made it explicit that no particular tactic is off the table (for those keeping count, that includes: nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, carpet-bombing, etc.). At home, Tim Russert is saying on national Teevee that the line between security and freedom will have to be redefined — meaning less freedom. Already motions are being made to strengthen the police state through imposing new bans on Internet security software, increasing invasive searches and racial profiling of Arabs at airports, and extending the FBI’s wiretap powers. Nobody in the government feels they can afford to stand up to the railroading tactics of the Defense Department and the FBI, and what’s worse, perhaps nobody even wants to.

We cannot ever, ever forget that the warfare State and the spectre of terrorism have been the greatest instruments of fascist tyranny, and the demonic influence of tyranny is hard to exorcise once it makes its way through. The Cheka (Lenin and Stalin’s murderous secret police) grew to power in the USSR through playing on the threat of counter-revolutionary terrorism in the early 1920s. Woodrow Wilson used WWI to force through tyrannical Sedition and Espionage Acts — which somehow failed to be revoked after World War I ended, and were continually used to suppress dissent during Wilson’s term. The supposed threat of Communist conspiracy was used to justify innumerable police state tactics (sometimes illegal, sometimes not) by the FBI, including their surveillance of Martin Luther King Jr. (who they attempted to blackmail) and Malcolm X (who they may have aided the Nation of Islam in murdering) and their murderous COINTELPRO program which they used to hunt down and kill members of the Black Panther Party and to destroy both above-ground and underground antiwar / radical Left activist groups. And already activists have been given notice to watch their backs, by Rep. Don Young (R-AK):

Young warned against rushing to the conclusion that Middle Eastern terrorists were responsible. There’s some possibility, he said that the attacks are linked to the protests against the World Trade Organization, another of which [actually, a protest against the World Bank/IMF –CWJ] is scheduled for later this month in Washington D.C.

If you watched what happened (at past protests) in Genoa, in Italy, and even in Seattle, there’s some expertise in that field, Young said. I’m not sure they’re that dedicated, but ecoterrorists — which are really based in Seattle — there’s a strong possibility that could be one of the groups.

Never mind that this is a vicious slander against Left-wing activists on the part of Rep. Young. It’s not any attempt to convey information at all. It’s an outright threat: *We are calling for new powers. And we are coming after you, all of you, the Lefties, the Muslim fanatics, the greenies, the anarchists, the militias… it doesn’t matter who you are, if you are opposed to this government and this American form of life, you will be targeted.

I don’t know what to say or what to do. I am physically, mentally, spiritually exhausted by what happened last Tuesday. I am horrified, I am sick, I still need more time to deal with this. But I am also scared, because I know that a lot of people — a lot of innocent Muslims, a lot of innocent people who look like Muslims, people who will be slaughtered in the bombing and covert operations pushed through by the same Reagan-Bush-Bush cabinet that brought you Iran/Contra and the death squads of El Salvador, people who will die in the terrorist retaliation, 18-24 year olds like me who will be sent to fight and die, dissidents like me who will be targeted by a growing, many-tentacled police state. Today I am honestly frightened about the prospect of domestic fascism in the United States of America.

I was poking around trying to find more information on the web about a group in Detroit that provides free sandwiches, condoms, counseling, etc. to women in prostitution, in an effort to help them survive and undermine pimp’s control over them. Unfortunately, what I could find was an article from the Detroit News gushing about a neighborhood group called the Video Posse which works together with the Wayne County sheriff’s office to harass women in prostitution, or women who just look suspicious, by videotaping them with camcorders, recording their descriptions and license plate numbers in a logbook, etc.

A volunteer for the group quite literally states (and the Wayne County sheriff agrees) that the objective is fear: Now, I actually see a change: it’s almost like the prostitutes are afraid to walk the streets and the johns are afraid to park. They also repeatedly blame the women in prostitution (who are parading up and down residential streets and referred to as hookers) for doing what they need to do to survive. Look, something like 90% of women in prostitution report that they want to get out but can’t. If you really want to fight the dehumanizing institution of prostitution, then escalating harassment of prostituted women will not help any. Instead, provide economic options for the women so they can get out. Then go after the pimps who use torture and drug addiction and threats to keep the women under their control, and lock them away like it’s going out of style.

Update 2005-12-11: I don’t know how I missed this, but a couple of years ago I actually got an e-mail (which was then buried under other e-mails without my reading it) with a pointer to the outfit that I was looking for originally when I ran across the sorry article about the Video Posse — the Street Outreach Project of Alternatives for Girls. They do very good work for women who are spat on, attacked, ignored, and left to die by the men who hold power — as pimps, as johns, as opportunistic cops, and as sanctimonious politicians. The Street Outreach Project uses a van as a mobile base, and sends teams through the streets of southwest Detroit and the Cass Corridor offering food, clothing, and shelter, along with HIV prevention materials, crisis intervention, rides for medical services, and referrals. They also organize support groups, activities, and case management services. You can help them in their work by contributing money, helping them with items from their wishlist, or by volunteering.