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We Are Making a Difference

January 20, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

When we set out to make a difference with our work, we usually are. It empowers us by doing it and empowers others who are trying to change the same things. It’s the belief in possibility that makes a new year, well…doable.
 
I came upon a guy last week who begins his day reading these phrases:

This is the beginning of a new day. You have been given this day to use as you will.
 
“What you do today is important because you are exchanging a day of your life for it.
 
“When tomorrow comes, this day will be gone forever. In its place is something you have left behind…let it be something good.

However “make the most of it” that sounds, it’s about whether we dare to face forward and declare ourselves because none of us has an unlimited number of days ahead of us when we can.
 
Historian David McCullough has written a dozen or so highly acclaimed biographies about Americans like Teddy Roosevelt, the Wright Brothers and John Adams. (You may also know him as the sonorous voice behind some of Ken Burn’s public television documentaries.) When he was interviewed about Truman, McCullough discussed this same quandary:  whether to bother standing up for what’s important when it’s so easy to give up before you’ve even started.
 
The interviewer began by noting that “your writing makes readers feel like they are there,” and McCullough replying that his writing this way is deliberate.

What I’m trying to do is show readers—especially young readers—that things didn’t have to turn out as well as they did. I want them to know that life felt every bit as uncertain to people back then as it does to us today. 
 
There were these moments when they had to be thinking, there is no way we can get this bridge built, or get this canal dug. But things worked out—because individuals behaved in certain ways, with integrity and resilience. They figured out how to work with other people, and they tried to do the right thing. 
 
And my hope is that these stories will inspire some readers to behave the same way in the face of the uncertainty in their lives.

I found the immediacy and uncertainty before what happens next to be most compelling in McCullough’s 1776.  But for tiny acts of imagination and courage all coming together 250 years ago, America would never have happened.  And I can be a part of the same miracle today—if I choose to.

In a strange twist of fate several years later, McCullough found himself talking with his new internist about the Truman interview, about how today is no different than it was in the past, and the amazing things we might accomplish by acting despite today’s uncertainties.

I try to make that point in every interview. It’s really the main reason I do the work I do.

McCullough’s rationale for his lifetime of work is sharing this knowledge. Everyone who went on to accomplish something important could just as easily have sat it out, yielding to fear or inertia  It’s not just a perspective for the young but for those at every stage of life who have a limited time ahead to leave behind something that they can be proud of. And finally, It’s not only advice for opinion writers or biographers, but for everyone who employs their skills on the gamble that they just might achieve a good result.

Writing this morning, it is easy to see 2019 as a gathering mess. No wonder people are looking for “unicorns” like Beto O’Rourke “to save the coming day for us” so we don’t have to get down into the trenches and do the hard work ourselves. But why not be a part of it, putting the faith in our own judgments instead of in a savior’s, particularly when so much that’s good has already been achieved in our lifetimes?

I can’t be reminded enough about the positive side of the ledger that’s laid out in Steven Pinker’s books like Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress (2018) (according to the data: life, health, prosperity, safety, knowledge, and happiness are all on the rise, and not just in the West, but worldwide), which builds on his earlier The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011) (that we’re living today in the most peaceful era in history).  Like David McCullough, the perspective of time helps me to overcome my excuses and failures of nerve.

In the last couple of days, there was also Greg Ip’s helpful column looking both back at the past year and forward into the new one in the Wall Street Journal. Ip called it “The World is Getting Quietly, Relentlessly Better,” and he begins it with a promise:

If you spent 2018 mainlining misery about global warming, inequality, toxic politics or other anxieties, I’m here to break your addiction with some good news: The world got better last year, and it is going to get even better this year.

But what I liked the most about the column was his conclusion after reviewing the data about rising incomes and global progress. 

Perhaps it…feels irresponsible to celebrate the many ways the world is quietly getting better because it distracts from the fight against things that are loudly getting worse: polarized and authoritarian politics, deadly opioids, nuclear proliferation, and most of all, a warming climate—a consequence of all those new middle-class entrants burning fossil fuels.
 
Yet obsessing over [these remaining] perils is how we’ll likely solve them.

Ip is saying that with focus and forward momentum—we can do this, and I happen to believe he’s right. We still have the hard work of planting the seeds that are there, but the ground is also in better shape than our sky-is-falling fears like to admit.

I wrote several posts last year about the threat of technology that arrives and is widely embraced before its downsides are known or anyone has had a chance to put reasonable safeguards in place. Social networks and smart phones today, with drone deliveries and autonomous vehicles soon to follow. The ethicist in me kept asking: “Just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean that we should, at least before we understand more of the implications than we do now.”  So last year felt like frantically catching up with the aggregators who are selling our personal data and the too-big-for-our-own-good companies that no one worried about soon enough. Much of the time, it felt like not having enough fingers for the holes in the dike.

But still I railed against the privacy profiteers like Facebook and Google (for the sake of our ability to make decisions without manipulation) and monopolists like Amazon (because the free flow of goods and labor really is important). And all the while, others with similar sensibilities were jumping into these trenches too, with no certainty that anything would come of it. Well, this past week saw several news stories about progress that is being made where I doubted it ever would.

A story on January 11 announced that AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile would no longer be sharing their users’ location data with those who are selling it to trackers because of privacy concerns that had been raised. Yesterday, Sprint followed up with the same decision. It was a victory (for now) over some of the tech giants with a brand new cohort of privacy advocates behind it. 

Last Friday, there was a news report that customers, investors and employees are challenging Amazon’s facial recognition software because of similar privacy concerns. A group of nuns who are also investors have submitted a resolution for a vote at Amazon’s annual shareholders meeting. The company has refused thus far to halt the sales of personal data generated by its software, but it has been forced into a dialogue it would never have had without widespread pushback.

My favorite marker from last week also speaks to the critical mass of individual voices that have been building, one by one, against Facebook even when the odds against them seemed most daunting. Roger McNamee, an early investor in the company, was one of them. Despite becoming rich, having a personal relationship with Mark Zuckerberg, sitting on Facebook’s board for a time, and being a prominent member of the insider’s club in Silicon Valley, McNamee was one of the first to challenge Facebook’s excesses that nobody could ignore. It took his early critical statements along with the past 9 months of populist backlash to culminate in Time’s cover story this week—a testament to how voices both big and small can coalesce into a wave.

I want to mention something else too. I’m hardly a frontline tech commentator, but Roger McNamee signaled me through Twitter yesterday after I profiled his essay in Time. I’m not telling you this because it’s cool that he did but because taking a stand in your work, however you can, often puts you in the company of those you can be proud to be associated with. The experience of this kind of solidarity also helps me to forsake the safety of my fence and dive into the fray even when I’m reluctant to do so in the work that stares back at me every day.
 
It’s not just pushing the same rock up the hill, only to have it roll back down to its same old place. There is progress when I look for it, and I’m almost never alone.

More Seed Pods This Week

There’s a wooden arch at our backyard entrance. It’s heavy with wisteria branches that are hung (as if for the holidays) with seedpods. 
 
A few years ago, when Brendan Ryan’s painting crew was here gentrifying the place, I was outside, by this archway, talking to one of his painters when a prior generation of seedpods started popping like firecrackers, propelling their seeds loudly and with amazing velocity in all directions. It happened in March, with some change in temperature or water pressure that neither of us could feel triggering the explosion. We laughed when we realized what was happening, and eventually fell into quiet to absorb the miracle of it.
 
The wisteria was thrusting itself into the future.
 
Of course, we need more than nature’s rhythms to motivate us to get up and keep doing good work for another day or year. Plants also don’t make excuses, or have the luxury of feeling hopeless when their time has come. 
 
But there are markers that bolster optimism when I bother to look, that help me to believe that I’m neither Sisyphus nor going it alone. Perspective. A record of progress. Occasions of solidarity. It’s about winning the game in my head so I have another day’s worth of fortitude to win it outside.

This post was adapted from my January 20, 2019 newsletter.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Being Proud of Your Work Tagged With: David McCullough, Greg Ip, hope, momentum, moving from thought to action, optimism, perspective, Roger McNamee, solidarity, Steven Pinker

Kicking Off the New Year with the Mummers

January 6, 2019 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Does Philadelphia’s wildly improbable Mummers Parade even happen each year if we don’t have the pictures to prove it?

Interestingly, all of us taking pictures to prove that the unbelievable is happening for the 119th time (and that we’re all a living part of it) is just a recent addition to this highly interactive event.

I’ve gone since the first New Years Day after my move to Philly. That first year, I asked several locals (who, looking back, were probably suburbanites) about going to the Parade, and to a one they described a bestial rite that you’d only attend if you were interested in having someone vomit on your shoes. Watch it on TV “if you have to,” they said, “and turn it off “when you’ve had enough.” Happily, I didn’t take their advice, never got enough, and never once went home with dirty shoes.

In fact, I always ended up feeling more like I was wearing the same golden slippers (Ok, gilded sneakers) that the strutters with their dainty parasols had been wearing as they made their way down Broad Street—Oh dem golden slippers. The Mummers always portrayed a huge cross-section of the City that rarely gets its day at its friendliest and most colorful. It is our Mardi Gras.

After I’d been here for several years, I took a job at the local gas utility to try and leverage its strategic locations and infrastructure for a global energy market. There were maybe 300 of us “in management,” but the other 1500 workers were the rank and file representatives of the City’s sprawling neighborhoods like Nicetown, Tioga, Point Breeze, Frankfort, Port Richmond, and Bella Vista. As I learned, a large number of them transformed themselves into Mummers at their local clubs for every New Years Parade. Sometimes when I went to one of the plants to rally them to one cause or another, I imagined these men and women in their end-of-the-year finery as they huddled around me and knew them all the better for it.

The following pictures prove that I was there with them again this year along with Wally, some old friends and thousands of new ones. I think that the grey skies and the mild weather on Tuesday set off our local dazzle particularly well. Every New Year needs to begin with revelry, optimism and local connection that looks something like this.

Golden Sunshine boy

From the Wenches Division, a trio of lovelies

The Comic’s take on style

Kid-size golden slippers, a next generation Mummer taking a load off

From Broad Street’s median strip, the Americans are coming

We’re here too!.

Remembering the Day of the Dead for some reason

Local signage

A Fancy Division captain works the rails

Wally proves he was there too!

I hope you enjoyed a quick view of this year’s Mummers Parade. The last time this page contained a photo essay was after I visited New Orleans and saw a similarly local connection–this time to those who had died–in the City’s potters field. Here’s a link to it if you missed those heart-felt memorials the first time around.

This post was adapted from my January 6, 2019 newsletter.

 

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Using Humor Effectively, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: dem golden slippers, local connection, Mummers Parade, New Year's Day, Philadelphia, Philadelphia neighborhoods, rank and file, revelry, selfies, taking pictures, tradition

A New American Dream

December 23, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

July 4, 2018

I took this photo on the Fourth of July in Glenside, a town just outside of Philadelphia. Its citizens had set out chairs, waiting for a parade to honor a struggle that began in revolution but seems to have lost its momentum today.

Looking back at past newsletters and from them, even farther back in my life and my parents’ lives, I was surprised by how much I’ve been thinking about the future this year. It wasn’t my original intention.

I guess I’ve become convinced that the deep-down quality of the present isn’t the same as it seems on the surface—that the core I remember has been hollowed out—and that what’s coming next may shatter the illusion that the party we’ve been enjoying in spite of it will go on forever. Still, there is no denying that the party has been pretty grand while it’s lasted, a place to enjoy ourselves amidst all the comforts of home.

In our lifetimes and our parents’ lifetimes, America sold the Dream of sunny, middle-class home ownership, consumerism, material comfort, and upward social mobility that it thought it needed to reward its WWII veterans and win the ideological battles of the Cold War. (Our kitchens are nicer here than they are in Moscow.) Madison Avenue’s advertising machine helped with the sales pitch, and today we’ve not only won these wars but continue to live the Dream we were supposedly fighting for. And let’s face it, that American Dream has been delivered to many, if not most of us despite our rising income inequality, our concern that our kids may end up with “less” than we have today, and our shabby public infrastructure.

Of course, Edmund Phelps’ “mass flourishing” has been tapering off since the 1970’s (my 11-25-18 post) and our safety nets are fraying, but even the poorest neighborhoods have wide-screen TVs, smart phones, and more than their pets could ever want or need. So why, amidst all of this plenty, are we wondering:  “Is that all there is?” Is that comfortable surface all that we’re working for? Living for?

Maybe some of the uneasiness is recalling—on some level—that we once had more ambitious dreams than getting the latest gadget from Amazon delivered in an hour, binge-watching another series on Netflix, or pleasuring ourselves with the latest meme on Facebook. We’ve either heard about or actually remember a time when the American Dream was much bolder than the warm bath we’re sitting in today—and that those more vital days weren’t so long ago.

In his 1999 book For Common Things, Jed Purdy recalls the transformative political climate of The Great Society of the 1960s where America debated ways “to eliminate” inequalities based on race and “to wage a war” on poverty. A half-century later, that debate has been reduced to “managing” the poor with welfare programs and racial inequality with good intentions. Looking at the diminishment of our public aspirations, Purdy argues that:

Americans who came of age after 1974 have never seen the government undertake a large-scale project other than highway maintenance and small wars, and relatively few are inspired by the idea that it should.

Of course, state-engineered income and racial equality would likely interfere with the mass flourishing of Phelps’ more individualistic and entrepreneurial economy. But what may be most noteworthy about where we find ourselves is the absence of any serious debate—really any tension at all—between the basic problems we face and the different ways we could solve them. This acceptance of “the way things are,” along with our sedating comfort, are the principal reasons that the American Dream has become “fossilized” and needs to be reimagined. Very little of it still resonates with any of us at its core.

Behold America: A History of America First and the American Dream by Sarah Churchwell ends with that argument. But before getting to its conclusion, most of her new book is about returning to the newspapers, speeches and other original sources over the past 150 years to identify “the gaps” between “what we tell each other that history shows and what it actually says” about the quality of the American Dream.

While Churchwell finds plenty of evidence of darkness in our nativism, racism, and materialism, the forces of light have nearly always shined brightly in our history as well. In the five years between 1915 and the end of the Great War, America rocked between an isolationist, America-First agenda to making the world safe for democracy on the battlefields of Europe and trying to create a new League of Nations. Before and after the Civil War, during the Gilded Age of business monopolies and mass immigration, and during the Great Depression some of our most selfish tendencies as a nation were in pitched battles with champions of social justice and “principled appeals for a more generous way of life.”

Through much of our history, there has always been a push and pull that defined the American Dream for the generations that were trying “to make it” here—at least until fairly recently. It’s the long stretch since the Great Society of the 1960s to the present that Churchwell is most worried about.

According to the historical record she has unearthed, the America that is reflected in its Dream has “diminished,” and the fact that we once “dreamed more expansively” has been “obscured.”  As she eloquently argues, “if even your dreams are ungenerous, then surely you have lost your way.”  In its 300+ pages, Behold America demonstrates how a “rich, complex, difficult dream” has been forgotten in a race that focuses on wealth, material comfort and disengagement from a broader struggle for America’s soul. For Churchwell, the time to re-energize a Promise that once motivated us as workers, as citizens and as a nation is now.

So why aren’t we doing so? Churchwell doesn’t say, but I’ve tried to offer some explanations here over the past several months—at least for our personal reluctance. Beyond disengaging from any notion that sounds like rally-around-the-flag or that asks us “to believe in something” instead of remaining at a cynical distance, preoccupation with our comforts and “the rush of the future” leave little space for the kinds of activism that challenged America’s worst tendencies in the past.

Almost a year ago (in my 1-7-18 newsletter), I quoted from a Roxane Gay essay about “the tiny house movement” that quickly turned from playful to serious regarding the promises that we make to one another.

When we talk about the American dream, we never talk about what that dream costs. We never talk about how so many Americans are one financial crisis away from losing their savings or their homes. And we don’t talk about how the American dream should not be grounded in material things like large homes or fancy cars rather than, say, single-payer health care, subsidized childcare, or a robust Social Security system.

We don’t talk enough about what should and shouldn’t be included in the American Dream and spend even less time acting on our convictions. Perhaps there’s not enough hope that anything we do will matter. But believing in our priorities enough to act on them always matters.  As John Berger says in my post last month about the rescuers after the Paradise California fire, hope is the fuel, the “detonator of energy,” that drives us to act on our convictions. A dream, the American Dream, is just a good story that embodies those hopes.

I mentioned several reasons why the fuel line between hope and action gets clogged in another post last August.

The Future Is Coming At Me Too Fast to Do Anything Other Than Meet It

Whole industries can change in a heartbeat. Think local travel (Uber, Lyft). Remote travel (Airbnb). Outside shopping (Amazon). Personal transport (self-driving cars). Our phones change, the apps on them change, how we use them and protect them changes. We’re so busy keeping up with the furious pace of change, we can’t think about any future other than the leading edge of it that we’re experiencing right now.”

I’m Too Absorbed By My Immediate Gratifications To Think Long-Term

The addictiveness of social media. The proliferation of entertainment to listen to, watch, and get lost in. The online availability of every kind of diverting information. A consumer economy that meets every real and imagined need for those who can afford it. We move between jobs that fail to engage us to leisure time that gratifies us into a kind of torpor. We’re too sedated by the warm bath we’re in now to worry about a future that hasn’t arrived yet.

My General Laziness and Inertia

And not just during the dog days of August….

The only way to overcome these obstacles is by finding enough hope to want to demonstrate our capabilities and act on our generosity once again.

In the Shadow of the Washington Monument

In his poem the Hollow Men, T.S. Eliot described the moral emptiness that seemed to him to envelope everything in the wake of World War I.  What he wrote then is not so different from where we find ourselves today.

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

The July 4th parade in Glenside aimed to celebrate what we’ve “created” and how we’ve “responded” to our challenges as a nation but it has fallen into Shadow. In our jobs, as members of a community and as citizens, the only way out of the Shadow is to “respond” once again to priorities that are bigger than our comfort or cynicism and to “create” an American Dream that is worth living in again: one capable and generous step at a time.

This post is adapted from my December 23, 2018 newsletter.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Being Proud of Your Work, Building Your Values into Your Work Tagged With: American dream, aspiration, consumerism, future, future of work, generosity, hope, materialism, nativism, reason to work, Sarah Churchwell, selfishness, storytelling

Building Confidence in the Future

November 18, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Saginaw County Fair – 2014

The future was on my mind a lot this week, probably because several stories were arguing for its importance and vulnerability.

Some of it was the mid-term election, which the press kept reminding us was about choosing our political future, as if we’d be able to get it right or wrong in one fell swoop. Now with the hype behind us, it looks like all we’ve done is kick the can down the road.

Then there was the centenary of “the Great War,” and all the future-talk back then. “Making the world safe for democracy” was what Woodrow Wilson promised as he navigated us from continental isolation to European battlefield that first time, going back again 20 years later, and on to Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. It’s what keeps us in the tribal mess of Afghanistan today–maybe safer, but not quite safe.

What am I voting for, fighting for, working for if not for what I hope? Is it to be safer tomorrow? To make one thing better? To change even more about the world than that? So far this week, 2018 seemed an ill-suited time to build much confidence in the future.

But then came the future as apocalypse. A place that its Gold Rush settlers had called “Paradise” was incinerated, burning many of those who were living there today beyond recognition. The future for the survivors who remained was also stripped bare: of homes, belongings, neighbors, pets, of familiarity and routine.

Still, a less blackened way to think about the future came from what happened next. It was not a government rescue or a swell of self-reliance, because most of the survivors live on fixed or limited incomes, with little fat to fall back on. Instead it was how quickly people in nearby towns moved beyond “the transmission of thoughts and prayers” to an outpouring of generosity.

In another irony for Paradise, just when their hopes for the future seemed obliterated a new community gathered around those who remained–even as more wild fires continued to bloom in the east. This short video clip captures some of the outpouring this week, dressed (either improbably or not) as a Sexy Panda food truck.

Regular people recognized themselves in their neighbors’ tragedy and spontaneously gathered to start building their future together, not by offering  “pies in the sky” from afar but in a Walmart parking lot where displaced families had fled and are still living out of their cars. FEMA, the National Guard, and “the local authorities” may think they know better, but a future that’s worth having is usually created when one capable person cares for another.

As Rebecca Solnit writes in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities:

much societal effort goes into withering us away from [our] fullest, most powerful selves. But people return to those selves, those ways of self-organizing, as if by instinct when the situation demands it.  Thus disaster is a lot like a revolution when it comes to disruption and improvisation, to new roles and an unnerving or exhilarating sense that now anything is possible.

As if by instinct, some of that improvisational euphoria was visible in Walmart’s parking lot this week. The helpers felt empowered by their involvement while the survivors found the ability to tap into their own reserves of autonomy and generosity, telling me and everyone else who was listening that “We will make it.”

Over the summer, National Public Radio launched an occasional series where it asked listeners to identify songs that were “the most uplifting in their experience.” This week, NPR profiled one of them, Simon & Garfunkel’s “American Anthem,” and recorded listener reactions while the song played in the background. When I caught the Morning Edition segment over coffee, I was overtaken by the wistfulness in its college-boy lyrics and ethereal delivery and by how others still felt it too.

Cathy, I said as we boarded a Greyhound in Pittsburgh
Michigan seems like a dream to me now
It took me four days to hitchhike from Saginaw
I’ve gone to look for America…

Cathy, I’m lost, I said though I knew she was sleeping
And I’m empty and aching and I don’t know why
Counting the cars on the New Jersey Turnpike.
They’ve all come to look for America

All come to look for America

For me, the song transports because you can feel the movement of the bus in its rhythms and catch glimpses of the country not as a whole but in its particulars: Pittsburg, Saginaw, the New Jersey Turnpike.

As a people, we are also more interested in where we’re headed than in where we’ve been. So I wasn’t surprised when one listener said: “For me, getting to know America is more about the questions that we ask than the sort of sureness that we might reach in our own experience,” or that another added: “I think all of us are still searching for America and hoping to find it and define it and give it meaning. And we all do that in our own way.”  In this gem of a song, “looking for America” is looking for the future and wanting (so very, very hard) to believe in what we will find.

In Earning the Rockies: How Geography Shapes America’s Role in the World, Robert Kaplan was also “looking for America” when he set out on his road trip across the country a couple of years ago. He tells us he found it near the border between Nebraska and South Dakota when he visited Mt. Rushmore.  This is what he saw there:

Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt: the four greatest presidents at the time of the 150thanniversary of American independence in 1926, when [Gutzon] Borglum [the sculptor] began his work here. The granite insures that the work will stand undiminished for at least a thousand years. After I have driven across the continent into the wilderness, Mount Rushmore offers me revelations in person that all the photographs of it cannot. For Mount Rushmore overwhelms precisely because of where it is located, not on the Capitol Mall but atop a mountain in the West, part of the original Louisiana Purchase, bearing the promise of the continent that was the upshot of pioneer optimism. An optimism that, in turn, was driven by democracy and the breaking down of European elite systems that these four presidents did so much to originate and secure. The culmination of the American story—one that Washington and Jefferson began—has more to do with the West than the East.

These carvings, despite their inhuman size, are strangely not oppressive or totemic. They do not intimidate or call to mind some tyrannical force. There is light and not darkness in the eyes of these presidents. Each is looking into the future, it seems…The result…is a myth of light that puts into some tragic perspective…the darkness rained [by white settlers and soldiers] on the native inhabitants and their way of life in these same hills. (the italics here are mine)

For Kaplan, it is in the tension and contradiction between America’s loftiest ideals and its worst inclinations that hope in the future lies. In another irony, he finds the confidence that can ultimately win out in a popular gathering place a few miles away.

[I]n the adjacent tourist trap of Keystone, South Dakota, many of the waiters and waitresses are from places as diverse as Ukraine, India, Nepal and so on. They are trying to make it and stay in America—yes, still the land of opportunity. Whereas at the [Mount Rushmore] viewing terrace there was whispering and outright silence, here the tourists—who include immigrants from Asia and Latin America—are all chattering away, exchanging notes and competing with one another to tell just how far and through how many states they traveled in order to get here. The license plates in the parking lots are from every part of the country. Keystone, snaking and ramshackle, is like a vast hostelry at an ancient pilgrimage site. The great and nearby monument has shown them what they all have in common.

I see the arc of my journey here. It has purpose. There is nothing eccentric about driving slowly for weeks on end, from one side of the continent to the other. Keystone reveals to me exactly what I am doing, since what I am looking for actually exists.

At a time when we are criticizing many of our monuments, this may seem a odd moment for Kaplan to celebrate one of them. But at their best, a country’s monuments can be symbols not of oppression or hypocrisy but of aspiration. They can say: despite its contradictions, America is still trying to grapple with its complicated legacy and to discover a hope-filled future where the frontier still stretches out in front of it.

The Walmart parking lot near Paradise, California this week.

Like the new and recent Americans who were celebrating their commonality in Keystone South Dakota, there are always opportunities to ground our hopes.

Without the talking heads in the media, the “thought leaders” in universities and think tanks, or (really) any of the elites awakening us to what seems “right” or “necessary” to them, we can declare our hopes by driving to wherever someone whose humanity we recognize needs us right now.

As John Berger, one of my heroes, has said: “hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow but a detonator of energy for action today.” It is a way to escape the daily distractions that anesthetize us, to battle our cynicism or despair, and to claim the practical, close-to-the-ground confidence in the future that drives all good work.

This post was adapted from my November 18, 2018 newsletter.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Building Your Values into Your Work, Work & Life Rewards Tagged With: confidence, frontier, future, hope, John Berger, Mount Rushmore, Paradise California, Rebecca Solnit, Robert D. Kaplan, Simon & Garfunkel American Anthem, the West, what we hold in common

Choosing a Future For Self-Driving Cars

November 5, 2018 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It looks pretty fine, doesn’t it?

You’ll no longer need a car of your own because this cozy little pod will come whenever you need it. All you’ll have to do is to buy a 30- or 60-ride plan and press “Come on over and get me” on your phone.

You can’t believe how happy you’ll be to have those buying or leasing, gas, insurance and repair bills behind you, or to no longer have a monstrosity taking up space and waiting for those limited times when you’ll actually be driving it. Now you’ll be able to get where you need to go without any of the “sunk costs” because it’ll be “pay as you go.”

And go you will. This little pod will transport you to work or the store, to pick up your daughter or your dog while you kick back in comfort. It will be an always on-call servant that lets you stay home all weekend, while it delivers your groceries and take-out orders, or brings you a library book or your lawn mower from the repair shop. You’ll be the equivalent of an Amazon Prime customer who can have nearly every material need met wherever you are—but instead of “same day service,” you might have products and services at your fingertips in minutes because one of these little pods will always be hovering around to bring them to you. Talk about immediate gratification!

They will also drive you to work and be there whenever you need a ride home. In a fantasy commute, you’ll have time to unwind in comfort with your favorite music or by taking a nap. Having one of these pods whenever you want one will enable you to work from different locations, to have co-workers join you when you’re working from home, and to work while traveling instead of paying attention to the road. You can’t believe how much your workday will change.

Doesn’t all this money saving, comfort, convenience and freedom sound too good to be true? Well, let’s step back for a minute.

We thought Facebook’s free social network and Amazon’s cheap and convenient take on shopping were unbelieveably wonderful too—and many of us still do. So wonderful that we built them into the fabric of our lives in no time. In fact, we quickly claim new comforts, conveniences and cost savings as if we’ve been entitled to them all along. It’s only as the dazzle of these new technology platforms begin to fade into “taking them for granted” that we also begin to wonder (in whiffs of nostalgia and regret? in concerns for their unintended consequences?) about what we might have given up by accepting them in the first place.

Could it be:

-the loss of chunks of our privacy to advertisers and data-brokers who are getting better all the time at manipulating our behavior as consumers and citizens;

-the gutting of our Main Streets of brick & mortar retail, like book and hardware stores, and the attendant loss of centers-of-gravity for social interaction and commerce within communities; or

-the elimination of entry-level and lower-skilled jobs and of entire job-markets to automation and consolidation, the jobs you had as a teenager or might do again as you’re winding down, with no comparable work opportunities to replace them?

Were the efficiency, comfort and convenience of these platforms as “cost-free” as they were cracked up to be? Is Facebook’s and Amazon’s damage already done and largely beyond repair? Have tech companies like them been defining our future or have we?

Many of us already depend on ride-sharing companies like Uber and Lyft. They are the harbingers of a self-driving vehicle industry that promise to disrupt our lives and work in at least the following ways. They will largely eliminate the need to own a car. They will transform our transportation systems, impacting public transit, highways and bridges. They will streamline how goods and services are moved in terms of logistics and delivery. And in the process, they will change how the entire “built environment” of urban centers, suburbs, and outer ring communities will look and function, including where we’ll live and how we’ll work. Because we are in many ways “a car-driven culture,” self-driving vehicles will impact almost everything that we currently experience on a daily basis.

That’s why it is worth all of our thinking about this future before it arrives.

Our Future Highways

One way to help determine what the future should look like and how it should operate is to ask people—lots of them—what they’d like to see and what they’re concerned about. In fact, it’s an essential way to get public buy-in to new technology before some tech company’s idea of that future is looking us in the eye, seducing us with its charms, and hoping we won’t notice its uglier parts.

When it comes to self-driving cars, one group of researchers is seeking informed buy-in by using input from the public to influence the drafting of the decision-making algorithms behind these vehicles. In the so-called Moral Machine Experiment, these researchers asked people around the world for their preferences regarding  the moral choices that autonomous cars will be called upon to make so that this new technology can match human values as well as its developer’s profit motives.  In an article that just appeared in the journal Nature, the following remarks describe their ambitious objective.

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence have come concerns about how machines will make moral decisions and the major challenge of quantifying societal expectations about the ethical principles that should guide machine behaviour. To address this challenge we deployed the Moral Machine, an on-line experimental platform designed to explore the moral dilemmas faced by autonomous vehicles. This platform gathered 40 million decisions [involving individual moral preferences] in ten languages from millions of people in 233 different countries and territories. Here we describe the results of this experiment…

Never in the history of humanity have we allowed a machine to autonomously decide who shall live and who shall die, in a fraction of a second, without real-time supervision. We are going to cross that bridge any time now, and it will not happen in a distant theater of military operations; it will happen in the most mundane aspect of our lives, everyday transportation.  Before we allow our cars to make ethical decisions, we need to have a global conversation to express our preferences to the companies that will design moral algorithms, and to the policymakers who will regulate them.

For a sense of the moral guidance the Experiment was seeking, think of an autonomous car that is about to crash but cannot save everyone in its path. Which pre-programmed trajectory should it choose? One which injures (or kills) two elderly people while sparing a child? One which spares a pedestrian who is waiting to cross safely while injuring (or killing) a jaywalker? You see the kinds of moral quandaries we will be asking these cars to make. If peoples’ moral preferences can be taken into account beforehand, the public might be able to recognize “the human face” in a new technology from the beginning instead of having to attempt damage control once that technology is in use.

Strong Preferences, Weaker Preferences

To collect its data, the Moral Machine Experiment asked millions of global volunteers to consider accident scenarios that involved 9 different moral preferences: sparing humans (versus pets); staying on course (versus swerving); sparing passengers (versus pedestrians); sparing more lives (versus fewer lives); sparing men (versus women); sparing the young (versus the old); sparing pedestrians who cross legally (versus jaywalkers), sparing the fit (versus the less fit); and sparing those with higher social status (versus lower social status).

The challenges behind the Experiment were daunting and much of the article is about how the researchers conducted their statistical analysis. Notwithstanding these complexities, three “strong” moral preferences emerged globally, while certain “weaker” but statistically relevant preferences suggest the need for modifications in algorithmic programming among the three different “country clusters” that the Experiment identified.

The vast majority of participants in the Experiment expressed a “strong” moral preference for saving a life instead of refusing to swerve, saving as many lives as possible if an accident is imminent, and saving young lives wherever possible.

Among “weaker” preferences, there were variations among countries that clustered in the Northern (Europe and North America), Eastern (most of Asia) and Southern (including Latin America) Hemispheres. For example, the preference for sparing young (as opposed to old) lives is much less pronounced in countries in the Eastern cluster and much higher among the Southern cluster. Countries that are poorer and have weaker enforcement institutions are more tolerant than richer and more law abiding countries of people who cross the street illegally. Differences between hemispheres might result in adjustments to the decision-making algorithms of self-driving cars that are operated there.

When companies have data about what people view as “good” or “bad”, “better” or “worse” while a new technology is being developed, these preferences can improve the likelihood that moral harms will be identified and minimized beforehand.

Gridlock

Another way to help determine what the future should look like and how new technologies should operate is to listen to what today’s Cassandras are saying. Following their commentary and grappling with their concerns removes some of the dazzle in our hopes and grounds them more firmly in reality early on.

It lets us consider how, say, an autonomous car will fit into the ways that we live, work and interact with one another today—what we will lose as well as what we are likely to gain. For example, what industries will they change? How will our cities be different than they are now? Will a proliferation of these vehicles improve the quality of our interactions with one another or simply reinforce how isolated many of us are already in a car-dominated culture?

The Atlantic magazine hosts a regular podcast called “Crazy Genius” that asks “big questions” and draws “provocative conclusions about technology and culture” (Many thanks to reader Matt K for telling me about it!) You should know that these podcasts are free and can be easily accessed through services like iTunes and Spotify.

A Crazy Genius episode from September called “How Self-Driving Cars Could Ruin the American City” included interviews with two experts who are looking into the future of autonomous vehicles and are alarmed for reasons beyond these vehicles’ decision-making abilities. One is Robin Chase, the co-founder of Zipcar. The “hellscape” she forecasts involves everyone using self-driving cars as they become cheaper than current alternatives to do our errands, provide 10-minute deliveries and produce even more sedentary lifestyles than we have already, while clogging our roadways with traffic.

Without smart urban planning, the result will be infernal congestion, choking every city and requiring local governments to lay ever-more pavement down to service American automania.

Eric Avila is an historian at UCLA who sees self-driving cars in some of the same ways that he views the introduction of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. While these new highways provided autonomous access to parts of America that had not been accessible before, there was also a dark side. 48,000 miles of new highway stimulated interstate trade and expanded development but they also gutted urban neighborhoods, allowing the richest to take their tax revenues with them as they fled to the suburbs. “Mass transit systems [and] streetcar systems were systematically dismantled. There was national protest in diverse urban neighborhoods throughout the entire nation,” Avila recalls, and a similar urban upheaval may follow the explosion of autonomous vehicles.

Like highways, self-driving cars are not only cars they are also infrastructure. According to Avila, if we want to avoid past mistakes all of the stakeholders in this new technology will need to think about how they can make downtown areas more livable for humans instead of simply more efficient for these new machines. To reduce congestion, this may involve taxing autonomous vehicle use during certain times of day, limiting the number of vehicles in heavily traveled areas, regulating companies who operate fleets of self-driving cars, and capping private car ownership. Otherwise, the proliferation of cars and traffic would make most of our cities unlivable.

Once concerns like Chase’s and Avila’s are publicized, data about the public’s preferences (what’s better, what’s worse?) in these regards can be gathered just as they were in the Moral Machine Experiment. Earlier in my career, I ran a civic organization that attempted to improve the quality of Philadelphia city government by polling citizens anonymously about their priorities and concerns. While the organization did not survive the election of a reform-minded administration, information about the public’s preferences is always available when we champion the value of collecting it. All that’s necessary is sharing the potential problems and concerns that have been raised and asking people in a reliable and transparent manner how they’d prefer to address them.

In order to avoid the harms from technology platforms that we are facing today, the tech companies that are bringing us their marvels need to know far more about their intended users’ moral preferences than they seem interested in learning about today. With the right tools to be heard at our fingertips, we can all be involved in defining our futures.

This post is adapted from my November 4, 2018 newsletter.

Filed Under: *All Posts, Being Part of Something Bigger than Yourself, Continuous Learning Tagged With: autonomous vehicles, Crazy Genius podcast, ethics, future, future shock, machine ethics, Moral Machine Experiment, moral preferences, priorities, smart cars, tech, technology, values

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David Griesing (@worklifeward) writes from Philadelphia.

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