Fear of a Bionic Planet

Boston Dynamics' first high-profile walking robot shuffled like a newborn colt

Whenever Boston Dynamics (a former Google subsidiary) releases videos of its newest robotic accomplishments, most internet fans feel compelled to comment on how humans treat the robots. Every video demonstrates the robots’ ability to compensate for adverse conditions by having employees trip, kick, or bludgeon the robots with instruments. The robots always obligingly stay upright… and cue the predictable “robot uprising” jokes.

Not my friend Jay. Among America’s last die-hard pinkos, Jay sees these robots as the apotheosis of his longed-for workers’ utopia. “Everyone will be unemployed in 20 years,” he boasts. “Even professions such as surgeon and medical doctors are going to be automated.” Where this ex academic considers this a dangerous precedent, Jay applauds the possibilities: “With this technology we can build a luxurious socialist economy where no one has to work.”

Though I don’t disagree with Jay’s reasoning, I’d question whether this is reasonable, or even possible. I base my doubts on two basic questions: How have such prophecies unfolded in the past? And, would most people consider this development desirable? I have simple answers for both: “poorly,” and “no.” Given recent advances in technology, and general resentment of work, these opinions may seem counterintuitive. So let me defend my positions.

First, the prophecies. Clear back in 1997, Utne Reader featured a series of articles, dominating an entire issue, on how society’s ever-accelerating pace was detrimentally affecting Americans broadly. In one sidebar (apparently not archived online), the editors included several now-obsolete predictions about how speeding technology would transform the future. With both computers in the 1960s and automation in the 1930s, futurists proclaimed the imminent demise of work.

By their second high-profile model, Boston Dynamics made their robots trot like harness ponies

They didn’t mean just a little bit, either. These futurists predicted that humans broadly would struggle to find anything with which to occupy the now-abundant time. Around the same time, without apparent irony, David Brin wrote something similar about near-future prospects in Popular Science. These predictions make having time to burn feel, as Jay says, “luxurious.” This overlooks that we have names for unemployed people trying to burn off excess time: addicts.

So, our predicted coming leisure time keeps never happening, big deal. We need only succeed once and we’re all golden, right? Maybe, but I’d dispute that. While having abundant free time sounds wonderful, anybody who’s taken a long weekend to run naked through sun-dappled fields of daffodils knows how quickly the bliss peters out. Before long, you find yourself melancholy, studying anthills, wondering whether it’s time to return to work yet.

Catholic economist John Médaille notes that most people, confronted with self-directed time, spend it doing stuff that, if they received pay for it, we’d call “work.” Woodworking, knitting, community theatre, writing a blog… some people consider these paying careers. Others do them for fun. The only leisure-time activities that don’t resemble work are those which involve dissipating your time away, like watching television or getting drunk.

Socialist writer Barbara Garson admits she began her discursion on hierarchical employment, All the Livelong Day, assuming, as socialists do, that capitalism forces work upon unwilling workers. (Writing, in her mind, wasn’t really “work.”) However, she discovered that people want work, they seek it, and when profit-first employers strip work of meaning, workers try to infuse meaning back in. Work, she realized, isn’t a burden, but a shared human desire.

Boston Dynamics' latest piece of self-promotion walks bipedally, handles rough terrain,
and picks itself up when this bearded turkey shoves it with a log

Many sociologists define humans distinct from other animals by three traits: forming relationships, cooking food, and working. As Jesus said, the birds of the air and the lilies of the field neither labor nor toil. Christian scholars often take work as an emblem of Original Sin, following the Genesis account; but other faiths share the belief. Consider the Buddhist maxim: “Before enlightenment, chop wood, carry water. After enlightenment, chop wood, carry water.”

Even scientists and non-religious persons recognize the centrality of work. Psychologists speak of the existential malaise humans suffer when lacking meaningful work, and the documented psychological consequences of long-term unemployment strikingly resemble PTSD suffered by ex-soldiers and rape survivors. And Jay would redistribute this meaning-making activity onto robots. But why? Work isn’t something to offload onto others. Work gives our lives meaning.

Turning our responsibilities over to robots sounds empowering. Isaac Asimov, wounded by the irrationality of World War II, proposed the same over sixty years ago. But as advances in technology prove overwhelmingly banal, and advances in psychology demonstrate humans crave work, that attitude seems naïve now. Robots may redefine what work means for coming generations. But work should not, arguably must not, ever completely go away.

Trapped Inside an Altered Body

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Battery Dies, Part 69
Elisabeth Kuhn, Average C-Cup: Poems

It's a shame nobody reads poetry anymore. Because when readers dismiss poetry as something inscrutable out of the past, they are losing the chance to introduce themselves to forward-thinking word crafters like Elisabeth Kuhn.

German-born and Berkely-educated, Kuhn takes the same world-wise travelling mentality in her verse that she takes in her life. She is also wise enough to recognize something that many academic poets these days have forgotten: that formal verse exists because people like to read it. Kuhn crafts verse in accessible forms like villanelles and sonnets, forms that a poetry audience will read for pleasure, and uses these forms to address difficult issues.

The issues Kuhn wants to address emerge from her own life. Foremost is her battle with breast cancer, culminating in a partial mastectomy which leaves her with two very different breasts—thus the title. In a world that values women according to their appearance, she struggles to decide where that puts her. Different poems show her in different places, but she remains generally optimistic, strong enough not to be broken by anybody looking at her body strangely.

Some poets are primarily storytellers, like T.S. Eliot, and some bare their sins in the Sylvia Plath style. Kuhn approaches poetry with the aplomb of a creative memoirist. The most important element in her poetry is herself, but she is not just flatly telling her story, she is telling us why her story should matter to us. And for the most part, she is telling us her story well.

I admit flinching when I began reading. The very first poem, "Palpitations," is a sestina, a form where key words repeat according to a geometric schedule across thirty-nine lines. It's a very difficult form, and Kuhn judders markedly on this one as well. Occasional pieces like this, which suggest they were written for an MFA poetry class, don't jibe well. When one such piece opened the collection I got a little queasy and thought I was in for a bad ride.

But I'm glad I stuck with the book. There are real treasures in this book, insights into being human as well as insights into being Elisabeth Kuhn. Consider these lines, from "The Pleasure Is Mine," discussing breast reconstruction:

...I'd feel as if he fondled
molded jello, glued
to my chest.

Elisabeth Kuhn

This deceptively simple analogy contains within it such nuance about human relationships, sexuality, sensuality, individual identity, and the human body. The author feels partly adrift inside her altered body, but she refuses to be prettified just to satisfy an abstract individual she might never meet. These lines are very direct, yet freighted with all the depth and complexity that human language can bring to bear upon them. And these are just three lines in a much longer book.

Kuhn’s struggles dwell in the present, but also unfold into the past. Her conservative German Catholic upbringing, one she addresses directly rather than hiply walking away, presages her adult difficulties with relationship and identity. Church and family should be the first place young girls learn trust, yet that frequently isn’t what she learns, as in “Sin”:

My sister had been good.
She was allowed
to pick a woolen thread
for Jesus’ crib so he would be
warm and comfortable.
I had done something to anger Mother.
I had to pick a needle.
Jesus would have to suffer
for my sins.

The poem gets only darker from there, not only from its actions, but from Kuhn’s innocent incomprehension. Her base poetic voice is the eternal, bewildered Even being born German carries weight. As a bilingual, bi-cultural woman, Kuhn brings outsider perspectives to nearly every situation, including this from “Original Guilt”:

When we were teens, we’d sometimes
flash the Heil Hitler sign
as a joke. It always upset the adults,
like questions about sex, and that forbidden
stanza of our National Anthem
we’d sometimes roar at parties, drunk:
Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles!

Some poems ring hollow in this volume. Kuhn is a journeyman poet, and even great masters don't succeed every time. But on balance, this readable book offers rewards for experienced poetry readers and casual bookworms alike. I would go out of my way to recommend a book like this to other readers.

These poems let us glimpse a woman’s heart, and together they give us a banner insight into the complexity of one person's life experience. She promises much in the future, and on the evidence of this first book, we have much to look forward to.



To hear Garrison Keillor read Elisabeth Kuhn's poem "Bathrooms," click here.

How To Have a Career In Outrage

Seriously, this is a thing. Click to enlarge

Early Thursday morning, while checking my regular websites, I had one of those weird moments made possible only by algorithm-driven electronic communications. Several Facebook friends, mostly graduate students or recent degree holders, shared various forms of outrage about Calvin Trillin’s newest poem, “Have They Run Out Of Provinces Yet?” Immediately below one such diatribe, Facebook ramrodded video clip from their tragicomic new Moto-Dojo ads. Apparently without ironic intent.

ICYMI (as the kids say), Trillin’s poem lists the various Chinese regional cuisines that have been aggressively marketed to Americans throughout his lifetime, each putatively hipper and more authentically Chinese than the last. When I first read this poem, before the shitstorm erupted, I interpreted it as a satire on how marketing gurus have commodified China, usually denuding it of history and accuracy in the process, for dumb-tongued Western audiences.

Moto-Dojo has no such, even hypothetical, justifications. It shows a white guy with a Fu Manchu mustache displaying supremely bad martial arts moves, in what appears to be his mother’s basement. This segues in various ways into some display of Motorola’s new mobile phone features. I’m unclear whether this chintzy, broadly imperialistic campaign comes from American-owned Motorola Solutions, or from Motorola Mobility, a subsidiary of China’s Lenovo Corporation.

For whatever reason, the sort of university-based umbrage-mongers who get upset at “cultural appropriation” have selected Trillin as this week’s receptacle of moralistic outrage, while politely overlooking Motorola. Critics have forced Trillin onto the defensive, making him explain what I considered obvious, that it’s “written about food snobs” and not about Chinese people. Motorola, by contrast, has been characterized with terms like “extremely comical” and “all in good fun.”

Calvin Trillin (AP photo)

This makes me wonder: who decides which villainies merit our anger? Is Trillin’s poem worse than Motorola’s ads because Trillin is an artist, supposed to have pure motives, while we accept such vulgarity from venal for-profit corporations? Our selective blindness about truly offensive situations, while seeking persecution where little exists, says something about our national psyche. Critics disparage some populations for seeking mass-market victimhood. But that’s becoming our entire society.

The Moto-Dojo advertising campaign looks like plain old yellowface, the same form of cross-cultural usurpation that made Hollywood movie studios think they could trowel “Oriental” makeup on Peter Ustinov and let him play Charlie Chan. I've complained about "cultural appropriation" accusations before, claiming the term is overused to demonize ordinary situations where art movements achieve mainstream acceptance. But this looks like a situation where it clearly applies.

Perhaps the abruptness of the reaction tells us something important. Though Trillin’s poem was included in a The New Yorker issue which shipped last week, and had been online for nearly a week before the outrage explosion, the reaction blew up late Wednesday evening and into Thursday morning. Nothing about the poem or its presentation changed on Wednesday. Just suddenly, for no visible reason, countless people became rashly angry.

Just as the explosion happened so fast, it ended almost as quickly. After I started writing this essay, I paused to, y’know, go earn a living. By Thursday evening, the furor had petered out; by bedtime, it had vanished entirely. Though some stray tubthumpers might still be posting somewhere in the twitterverse, the momentum of outrage had passed back to usual election-year targets, like Donald Trump or the Clinton legacy.

This hasty reaction, and its equally swift evaporation, says something. The social media echo chamber, fueled by what British journalist Mick Hume calls “full-time professional offense-takers,” prompts many contributors, eager to appear right-thinking, to jump on every bandwagon of moral umbrage, however specious. Because a certain fraction of outspoken Chinese-American dignitaries saw trespass in Trillin’s poem, media figures and graduate students followed suit, possibly without anticipating the ramifications.

The New Yorker issue which
contained Trillin's offending poem

Please don’t mistake my intent. Serious outrages do happen; sometimes, public figures deserve our scorn. The blowback last week over the Kenyon Review posting two cack-handed “Indian” poems online reached heights enough that the magazine eventually pulled the poems. (They claim it happened because the poet violated editorial guidelines, but c’mon.) Sometimes people get angry because bigwigs do something stupid, and earn the consequences they endure.

But this isn’t that case. High-minded crowds turned on Trillin because they behaved like a schoolyard mob over a vanishingly insignificant offense. And like such people do, they became so enwrapt in fake umbrage that they missed legitimately offensive behavior right in front of them. The effects of such viral outrage should frighten observant people. Because like all mobs, this one could turn on you.

The Philosophy of the Vague

Chris Luke, Power Habits: 101 Life Lessons & Success Habits of Great Leaders, Business Icons and Inspirational Achievers

I've noticed most bookstores have two sections side-by-side: "Self-Help" and "Psychology." The former is self-explanatory and highlights authors like Jack Canfield, Tony Robbins, and Sylvia Browne. The latter includes some scholarly psychologists, like Paul Ekman or Mihaly Czikszentmihaly, but is mainly dominated by what one New Republic reviewer called “self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it.” This book is, far and away, that category.

Author Chris Luke, who doesn't burden readers with anything so pedestrian as a bio or credentials, proffers a book that says nothing particularly wrong, but also says nothing particularly well. Luke offers 101 mini-essays, none over two pages, most just one plus some dangling lines. Each shares some putatively relevant life lesson, like "Challenge Yourself" or "Follow Your Curiosity," illustrated by examples from some famous, successful, or influential personality. Some examples are fictional.

My problem isn't Luke's principles. Indeed, some of them I like so much, I wish Luke spent more time unpacking them. Though Luke never mentions the word, these principles accord with classic Stoicism, a philosophy I recently rediscovered and have striven to apply in my own life. A handful of precepts Luke treats so briefly that they're arguably vulnerable to abuse if audiences read carelessly, but evidence suggests Luke's heart is in the right place.

No, my problems are sub-surface, facing more what Luke omits. For instance, despite the title, Luke never describes what habits are, nor how to engineer them. Unlike, say, Gretchen Rubin, Luke presents habits as something we do, not ways of reprogramming core mental processes. Despite advances in neuroscience, habit formation remains deeply controversial , profoundly unsettled and unsettling. Anybody who's tried muscling past bad habits knows how intractable our brains really are.

Just as our author omits structure, this book also omits process. Telling audiences to, say, "Cultivate Creativity," doesn't guide the nominally well-adjusted cubicle drone how to change thinking patterns learned through years of school and employment. Precepts like "Don't Wait For Permission" could sound offensive to poor or minority readers, structurally slapped down by economic and social forces that discourage, even punish, risk-taking or innovative behavior.

Marcus Aurelius, the great
Stoic philosopher

Let me reiterate: I don't mean Luke is wrong. Quite the contrary, his principles, if handled appropriately, are universal, portable, and empowering. But the applications are not. Telling people to "Focus" isn't good enough; entire religious traditions, like Buddhist meditation or Christian monastic prayer, are dedicated to improving individuals' ability to focus. Workers plagued by bills, responsibilities, and work-life balance, often want to focus, but need guidance actually doing so.

One short illustration should suffice. Luke says that, at the peak of his touring career, comedian Jerry Seinfeld "used a unique calendar system to motivate and pressure himself to write, even when he didn't feel like it." Holy schlamoly, now that's meaty! This old ex-teacher wants to say: "Speak more to that, please." Because I know the feeling of being too tired and discouraged to practice the art I love.

Too late, though: Luke has already caromed onto another topic. To Luke, these precepts aren't something smart people of earnest intention struggle to achieve; they're something we should just do, and quit dithering. Apparently he did. Luke repeatedly mentions his success building an exercise regimen from zero. I believe that's possible; I've seen it. But most beginners need an experienced coach, workout partner, or Phys-Ed teacher to start well. People who just start running usually get charley horses.

I believe Luke's 101 principles come from good solid foundations, and not just based on my experience. They're confirmed in authors from the ancient (Marcus Aurelius) to the modern (Charles Duhigg). Writers like Kelly McGonigal confirm the science, while journalists like Malcolm Gladwell, whom Luke quotes, confirm the practice. Robust evidence testifies that Luke writes from a position of strength, backed by history's best minds. At no point in this book does Luke say anything wrong.

But neither does he say anything likely to translate into action. Because his vague, gnomic essays contain no how-to steps, I fear his words will result in many solemn nods, many  "mm-hmms," and copious agreement. Then readers who concur with his opinions will do nothing. Because being right doesn't mean much, if you aren't also useful.

Sometimes, in writing reviews like this, I catch grief for not having any counter-proposal. But I'm no scientist or journalist; that's not my job. This review links several authors whose writing achieves what Luke promises. Take a look. The processes exist, for the diligent student.

Fuck Picasso

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part Seven
Ed Harris (actor/director), Pollock

In 1949, LIFE Magazine published an inside spread about a little-known New York painter named Jackson Pollock. Though he’d snagged occasional high-dollar commissions, nobody outside Manhattan’s intelligentsia knew Pollock until LIFE made him globally famous. Suddenly, canvases comprised of acrylic flowed over the surface, some larger than dining tables, fetched six and seven figures at auction. But this also commenced the artist’s irretrievable slide into self-destruction.

Actor Ed Harris became interested in Jackson Pollock when his father purchased a biography, for no other reason than he believed Harris physically resembled Pollock. As a self-taught expert, Harris never considered anybody but himself to direct this, his directorial debut; he floated several actors, but ultimately decided nobody but himself could enact his vision. This could have descended into an insufferable vanity project. But it does so much better.

Harris commences Pollock’s story in 1941. A 4-F Army reject with useless art credentials and no income, he’s crashing in his brother Sande’s plush apartment. He considers himself an unrecognized genius; his peers consider him a crashing drunk. Enter Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden), a fellow budding painter seeking professional connections. She recognizes in Pollock the same genius he envisions, and pauses her own career to foster his.

This poses significant problems. By sacrificing herself (her career wouldn’t resume until after his death), Krasner becomes both Pollock’s inspiration, and his enabler. Because Pollock really is a raging alcoholic, numbing himself to a world so chaotic that sensitive, wounded souls like him can’t withstand the pressure. Krasner quickly discovers that Pollock’s genius arises from his damage; the more tumultuous their life together, the more profound of art he creates.

And it is, undoubtedly, profound art. If you’re unfamiliar with Jackson Pollock, he created his most influential paintings by flowing paint onto the canvas from above, using the brush like a conductor’s baton. The resulting images are chaotic, frenzied, and completely missing any recognizable object; when people say “I don’t understand modern art,” they’re probably thinking Jackson Pollock. But his work perfectly encapsulated the reeling, frenetic post-WWII years.

As director, Harris lavishes attention onto Pollock’s creative process. His style is quick and gestural. In his earliest artworks, he slathers paint onto the canvas directly from the tube—an innovation made possible only by technological advances in quick-drying acrylic paint. Later, working in a converted upstate New York horse barn, he unlocks his later drizzling style by accident, making new expressions possible that no prior artist ever considered.

Ed Harris as Jackson Pollock, possessed by the muse

Therein lies an important theme of this movie: what is art? To Pollock and Krasner, art communicates something internal to the artist; the audience is a latecomer to the process. As his paintings convey Pollock’s inner turmoil, his personal life becomes more ordered. Pollock and Krasner wed, sober up, and become contributing members of their community. He successfully moves his inner pandemonium outward, where art makes the artist more human.

In this environment, art is intensely personal. Where art conservatories teach aspiring painters to mimic the masters, Pollock strives to create something unique to himself. He succeeds, but not without cost. He becomes disdainful of other painters; once, compared to Pablo Picasso, Pollock snipes: “Fuck Picasso.” It’s a beautifully understated moment expressing how, in becoming himself, he has become tragically disconnected from others. Famous, but alone.

But the clamoring public expects Pollock to repeat past successes, even as his inner struggle has moved onward. Trapped into mimicking himself, his psychological struggles reassert themselves, and he lashes out spitefully at anybody who dares approach him like a friend. As he descends back into drunkenness, alienates Lee Krasner (who supports his work but increasingly despises him), and takes a mistress, he becomes a caricature of the malignant genius.

There’s a moment, in the penultimate scene, that any artist will find difficult to watch. Driving drunk, unable and unwilling to divorce his wife, bereft of creative outlet only seven years after achieving fame, he looks at his beautiful but vacuous mistress (Jennifer Connelly), and the life drains from his eyes. Though physically alive when he drives over an embankment, we witness his dying moment. It’s painful to behold.

Renaissance artists created art to praise God—a God not all believed in, but nevertheless. Without God, art becomes something different, something personal. This movie suggests that’s why artists are frequently self-destructive, because they’ve parceled themselves out to the often unappreciative public. Harris has created an engaging story of how art consumes, in every way, the best artists. Like art, it’s beautiful and tragic.