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06/12/2024

Transportation Accessibility Analysis for Unelegant Universe

A Google search leading to an “I Love New York” type web site revealed that visiting restaurants in Hell’s Kitchen was one of the site’s most recommended attractions in New York City for people who are wheelchair users.  As part of my study of the role of transportation and innovative technology in facilitating access for people with disabilities, I conducted a wheelchair experiment to test that out.  I started at the Hampton Inn on 337 West 39th Street in the Garment District.  Level one transportation is the motorized chair, which had little problem leaving the hotel through the automatic door openers, although the second/outer door was a little quick on the close.

Once on the sidewalk, there were level two transportation options.  In New York City that could be cab, bus, personal auto, subway, private van service, etc.  For people not using wheelchairs there are biking, scooter, and rickshaw options that obviously weren’t a good choice; Uber and other private rides are not often accessible.  A personal auto is also not recommended in Manhattan for nearly anyone due to congestion and parking costs.  The subway does not serve Hell’s Kitchen from that direction (and many subway stations remain inaccessible to wheelchair users, so that would need scouted out in advance even if it were an option).  The cost for a private van was prohibitive compared to bus or cab fare, so ultimately the realistic choices were walking (i.e., moving by chair), cab, or bus.

The New York Times reported that the wait time for an accessible cab had been reduced from 34 minutes to 13 minutes, but my calls to cab services and talks to locals suggested that it still would be at least a 30-minute wait, and probably longer.  That left bus and just walking (chairing).  A quick look at the bus routes showed that there would be two quick changes of routes, and a couple of blocks jaunt to a bus stop.  It seemed since it was a sunny day that maybe a relaxing walk (chair ride) would just be the best option.  (Sidenote: MTA claims that 100% of their buses are accessible; of the 13 I saw on our journey all had accessibility equipment; there was no way to check that all were working…)  Since the restaurant area of Hell’s Kitchen was in theory less than ten blocks away, I decided to just go on my own.

I turned to the right and immediately encountered a construction enclosure over the sidewalk, but unlike others I would soon pass through, this one was wide enough that someone using a chair could pass by someone walking by in the opposite direction.  I reached the corner of 39th and Ninth Avenue and turned right.  So far, so good.  People, for some unnatural reason, seemed to want to steer clear of me, although personally I am starting to notice bad, uneven stretches of sidewalk that ultimately are a wear and tear on me, and on the chair, too.  I continued up Ninth past the bus garage and ultimately up to 42nd Street.  I couldn’t help but notice that a lot of the charming stores or small cafes had an eight inch or so threshold to get into the door.

I crossed over Ninth, trying to ignore a couple of delivery bikes clearly violating traffic patterns, and headed toward 10th Avenue on 42nd Street.  For the first time, I encountered sidewalk construction coverings that only had room for my chair and not so much for another person to pass.  This caused some awkwardness for others but not so much for me as I know I am entitled to the right of way.  Turning right onto Tenth Avenue and entering Hell’s Kitchen proper, then heading NE I encounter my first missing curb cut.  Why here? I wondered.  But it wasn’t long before a city repair crew blocked another intersection which did have a curb cut; but one not available to me!

About 46th Street (I don’t want to be too specific and give away anyone’s real business) we reached the restaurant we had scoped out online in advance, and it turned out that they, too, had a significant threshold.  The woman at the entrance offered first to have us sit outside in a sidewalk seating area (which I definitely didn’t want to do), and then seemed to toy with the idea of her brother helping me and the chair in, but I could tell she knew she shouldn’t do that and I ultimately acquiesced to sitting outside.

The space was cramped.  The woman helpfully scooted one table to the side, but from my perspective that was ad hoc and kept someone else from sitting outside who might have wanted to.  None-the-less, the food was as good as advertised and it was a delightful meal.  The people there were genuinely kind, attentive, and fun to talk to.

Leaving the restaurant, we decided to cut back over on 46th Street to head back to the hotel, making essentially a big square pattern.  Within the first two blocks, a sidewalk was fully closed for a stretch and I had to backtrack and recross to the other side; there were also more stretches of buckled and rough sidewalk; there were more narrow construction sidewalk coverings; and there were people who sometimes put on the expression that I was the problem slowing them down.

By the time we returned to the hotel, I was thoroughly exhausted, physically and mentally.  To say that restaurants in Hell’s Kitchen are an ideal attraction for people with disabilities including wheelchair users seems a bit problematic…

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Postscript.  I don’t normally use a wheelchair, but I conducted this experience on foot trying to imagine what it would actually be like.  Since transportation has been a major battleground over disability rights, and an incredible emerging technology over the last two-hundred years, transportation is one of the “innovation lens” through which I am trying gauge the impact of Artificial Intelligence on people with disabilities.  The moral of this short, mostly “true” story is: “Will the reality match the promise?” and “When has a new technology ever seriously changed people’s views about disability?”

Introduction

I may have invented a brand new word for this book: unelegant.  Some people claim that inelegant and unelegant are both words.  The latter means something gauche; out of style; not attractive; or something disapproved.  On the other hand, where it is accepted as a word, unelegant means the state of not being elegant and is agnostic, neither beautiful or ugly, not good or bad; it simply is not elegant.

We live in a complicated and quite elegant universe (with all due thanks to the great scientist Brian Greene, whose book I have read several times).  But I am arguing instead that A.I. is unelegant.  It simply is.  We, on other hand, cannot afford to be agnostic about A.I.

In 2024 Artificial Intelligence demands a brand-new synonym for its own name because the current two-word term and famous acronym in English has become completely stereotyped and meaningless in a remarkably short time.  There is no such thing as Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) anymore.  That is already an outdated concept.  There now are instead various groups of humans co-existing with other groups, networks, and collections of machines and technologies that people originally created, but which are now perpetuating themselves and quickly being adopted as surrogate “smart” family and community members we allow without question into our most intimate human spaces.

Georg Simmel’s classic social theory of the Triad (3 humans creating complexity by interacting in a group) has now become replaced by the AI-ad.  It is the reality of our times.  Rather than resisting an irresistible force, we instead must learn new ways to use social science to understand who we are in this series of relationships, and what our place in the world/universe with A.I. is.

This book is not about A.I. in any technical sense.  A.I. has already grown beyond the control and understanding of any one human being no matter what their individual genius.  Instead, this book is about what A.I. does to or has done to impact the human animal; how it directly and indirectly impacts the sapient brain and evolving neurology; what A.I. does to classic social science theory; how A.I. has changed long accepted notions of normality ranging from the “security” of the nation-state to the “how” of the ways we teach our children.  In fact, Generation Z is wired for A.I. (more of this later in the book).

On the interpersonal level, A.I. has introduced existential questions about relationships, ranging from sex robots to marriage between humans and an A.I.  On the bigger level, it is engaged in creating a new politics never seen before in human governance.  The list could go on and on.

But on the practical level, what does this all mean?

In realistic terms, it means a complete reimagining of every social structure we have taken for granted for the last two hundred years, from the family and the role of religion in daily life, to how we understand work and capitalism.  In fact, capitalism may be one of the early fatalities of the new paradigm (and even though it pains me as a sociologist to say it, that may not be a good thing).  In the world of A.I., Max Weber’s original conceptualization of rationality is turned upside down on its head—the rational technology becomes the irrational human partner, and vice versa.

I will illustrate in Chapter 1 the “Raccoon Theory,” which shows some of the basic neurology impacted by new technologies, and most importantly by A.I.  In Chapter 2, we will walk through some basic bomb shells that A.I. lobs into classic social theory about human behavior.  Chapter 3 will explore relationships, and how A.I. is impacting courtship, teamwork, and friendship.  Chapter 4 will build on Chapter 3 and specifically examine the workplace and how A.I. has transformed what it means to be an employee, a boss, an executive, and a CEO.  Later in the text, there will be an actual primer for employers and employees about how to live in this new work world (see Appendix 1).  Chapter 5 is about education, and what can be done to preserve the good but embrace the inevitable.  Chapter 6 will begin to explore the “Oppenheimer” aspects of A.I. with questions about what kind of new ethics and moral codes should guide the regulation and promotion of even newer A.I. or the soon anticipated “super intelligence” (still “a few months away” at the writing of this book…)  Chapter 7 will look at the possible fate of the nation state, the related politics and what A.I. means in terms of globalization.  Chapter 8 will deal with disability, sickness and injury, and the special things that can happen mostly only to humans.  Chapter 9 will conclude with a risky analysis of what might be next.

If you care about this type of thing, please not that A.I. did not author any portion of this book; it did, however, greatly facilitate its creation every day in many different ways, and it aided me personally, as well.

Cheers to the new world.

Jack Trammell, Ph.D.

Mount Saint Mary’s University (MD)

Why Being “Us” Matters

Jack Trammell, Ph.D.

It’s hard to look at my undergraduate students at the end of this fall semester and not have a great deal of trepidation and outright anxiety about the world they are inheriting. In the current world, I have tenure and they can take another class with me in the spring; I can choose the books they are assigned; I can discuss A.I. in the abstract and they aren’t frightened by the historical analogs; we can discuss globalization and diversity without fear of reprisal; we can engage in critical arguments about social justice and the welfare state; we can embrace the value of education for gainful employment and as an end in and of itself; we can discuss and debate the privileges of being American and/or studying in the United States.

But that is all possibly coming to an abrupt end.  What exactly, they want to know, does it mean to be “us” these days?? And why should we protect it?

Normally, I would coach my undergraduate students on the merits of “NOT just being ‘us’” but instead being global citizens with an obligation to the greater human good that transcends identity politics (ex. being “American,” or being young or old, etc.)  But with grinding war in Eastern Europe by proxy, renewed fighting in the Middle East, threats in the Asian Pacific region, protests all over the globe, and even very real domestic threats in the U.S.A. (according to F.B.I. Director Wray and others), it’s very difficult to resist the allure of protectionism, security, and an understandable desire to fall back on being on the “right side.”  Safety and comfort are seductive companions.

But the world is not safe.  America is not safe.  And we must ask “what it means to be us.”

The recent protests on college and university campuses over the war in the Middle East illustrate the perils of defaulting to platitudes and simplicities.  There are innocent people dying on all sides.  It’s not good enough to be on the right side anymore.  The world has “grown up” and we can’t escape our connections to “others” of all types.  And still, my students keep asking me “why does being us matter?” and I feel a strong obligation to reply to them in some meaningful way, shape, or form.  I can’t tell them “I don’t have an answer!” (That’s not acceptable for a Ph.D. with tenure, or a privileged white American male…)

As a sociologist, I have to go back to the “us” (and not the classic “I” and “me,” with all due respect to George Herbet Mead).  I am looking at twenty-five people in front of me in my American university classroom that represent at least five major faith traditions; at least five different gender identifications; three with dual citizenship; seven with at least one parent born in another country; five that are first generation college students; a multiplicity of racial and ethnic backgrounds that I can’t and won’t guess at; some legacy students from wealthy alumni parents; and all of them are paying a significant amount to obtain a liberal arts bachelor’s degree at my institution.  And they are here to get the answer to “what does it mean to be us?”

I suppose if you’ve read this far, or if you’re one of my students, you are demanding an answer.  So here goes…  To be us, in my opinion, means to be true to timeless American/human values: protect and cling to our fragile democracy; be slow to judge others and quick to assist those in need; embrace the value of education; cherish libertarian freedoms (like choosing my own textbooks for classes); try to make your voice be heard.  And most of all, remember that the “us” we strive so hard to find automatically creates the “them” and perpetuates many of the things we all agree are destructive and unprofitable.

But the world is not likely to stop for pleasant discussions like this.  In a democracy, you must vote to sustain the “us” and make your voice heard.  That is how the “why being us” question really matters.

###

Neomodernity and AI

By Jack Trammell, Ph.D.

Something happened this March that shook higher education to its core and changed everything.  A.I. (artificial intelligence) came on like another Pearl Harbor; a shot heard round the world that changed everything.  Some faculty senates even debated stopping the semester early.  AI was already around before this of course, but once every ordinary human could get on Chat GPT for free and try it out for themselves, a mass hysteria swept out of higher education and into the mainstream.  References to Hal (2001: A Space Odessey) suddenly were back in social media and pop culture everywhere, 55 years after the fact.

I tried to be rational about it.  The invention of the camera did NOT (in spite of fears at the time) spell the end of painting or portraiture, or art itself.  Those disciplines remain arguably as respected as they have ever been (and have you tried to find a good courtroom sketch artist these days??)  There are probably more horses alive now in the U.S. than there were when the Model T was released.  Yes, students cheated on assignments this spring using AI, and we used software to try and catch them.  The sky didn’t fall.  Yet.

Some important scientific, theological, and sociological voices are claiming that AI is profoundly different and a singular development in human history.  Some are sounding extremely grave warnings.

For me personally and as a social scientist, AI can seem like just one in a long line of developments that began around 1850 and continues to this day.  It made things like my Roomba and my iPhone inevitable.  But I also believe that something critical changed around 1950.  From sociologists like C.W. Mills to artists like Andy Warhol, a growing reaction to the horrors of the Holocaust and the H-bomb was in the makings that turns out in hindsight to have been a significant bump in the human road to ultimate progress.  We may indeed choose to look back on AI as an inevitable progression of modernity—but if it now has a “life” of its own how can the danger not be real?

Is AI capable of orchestrating a genocide?  Is AI capable of developing a new cosmic weapons system?  Is AI capable of being an evil leader behind the screen of a “fake” human leader?  Its defenders usually say “no” although when you corner them and ask them to define what AI can and can’t do they ultimately say something to the effect that, “the sky is the limit.”  Hmm.  Just the sky??

I will be honest.  I am scared of lots of things—rampant inequality; war; nationalism; greed—it’s a long list.  But now I have to say that I think AI is at the very top.

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This is the first chapter of a new manuscript I am working on. If you like it and want more I will post Chapter 2 later...

The Book of Answers – A Novel

© 2023

By Jack Trammell

Chapter 1

               The aliens were easily defeated. In fact, it seems cliché writing about it now and bothering to describe it. They came in peace, were susceptible to human guile (and bacteria), and when war came about their weapons were designed for an alien anatomy and had no effect on humans, and when they were dead their remains decomposed so quickly in the oxygen-laden atmosphere that no one had thought to try and preserve any. Now it was almost as if it hadn’t happened it all.

               It was the humans that were not so easily defeated. After the Russo-Sino Pact of 2043, the center of power had irrevocably turned to the East and combined with the remnants of America’s nuclear defeat at the hands of terrorists, a strange kind of postmodern dual monarchy arose with the Premier of China and the President of Russia wielding absolute power with totalitarian regimes to back them. Europe was still clinging to a fragile and facile alliance that exists to this day but feels as if it could collapse at any moment (or immediately upon Germany removing itself). But the “Pact Powers” in fact go wherever they want to, and do whatever they want to. The parts of the earth they have no care about would be easily within their grasp should they so choose.

               The Western Hemisphere—especially North America—returned to the middle ages. The wealthiest Americans migrated to a gloomy European mainland, where they prayed that their fragile fortunes (based on an unstable unified currency) would sustain them until they died, careless of coming generations. Those without means remained, stagnant, and returned to the simple ways of survival, using everything in the wrecked infrastructure from interstate highway medians to grow strips of grain to collapsing baseball stadiums for disorganized anarchist forums.

               If any of this sounds strange to you, it shouldn’t. The writing was on the wall in 2016.

               “Aaron! Get over here!”

               Aaron turned around but kept his eyes looking forward. He held what some would recognize as an antique AR-15 semi-automatic rifle which he had intentionally left unmodified. Ammo was so precious only a fool would have a fully automatic rifle. The black metal on the barrel and stock was mottled with bright scratches and an occasional dent. If guns could tell stories, this one would no doubt compose a long novel.

               “They’re still in front of us—be quieter!” he said.

               His companion was younger, perhaps fifteen if such things as years counted any more, and did not carry any firearm but an edged knife that appeared to be home-made from some kind of ancient wood-working tool, like a file or rasp. He seemed nervous, and his wild curly hairy gave him the appearance of a feral human.

               “Aaron!”

               “Hush, Ki!”

               Aaron moved further into the brush and raised his rifle, deliberately squinting one eye and gazing down the open sites. “Damn coyotes,” he said to himself, “you are never gonna take one of my chickens again.” He placed his finger on the trigger and started to pull gently, when suddenly there was a strange smell—a mixture of sulfur and hide. And just as he pulled the trigger, pandemonium broke out.

               He was tumbling. He heard Ki screaming. There were sharp fangs and claws. The AR-15 was gone. More tumbling and grunting and growling. And a dark, musky odor.

               Finally he was able to grab his opponent by the throat and push upward and a pair of red eyes bored straight into him. A snarling, frothing mouth revealed fangs the size of fingers. In the moment’s flash he saw Ki coming from behind with his crude knife.

               “No!” Aaron tried to scream. “No, Ki!”

               But it was too late. Ki jumped on the wolf’s back and before Aaron could react, Ki was plunging the knife over and over again into the side of the wolf’s thick neck. Blood, fur, and humans were in a confused, bloody jumble. Finally, with a convulsive shudder, the wolf started to go limp. An audible sigh of death came from within its throat like a strange growling groan.

               For a few minutes they both lay still, panting, in small pools of blood.

               “You okay?” Aaron asked, slowly coming up on his knees, his hands trembling in spite of himself. He was the strong one; he protected Ki; wolves didn’t take him out.

               Ki smiled. “I get the fangs. You can have the tail.”

               Ki was short for Malachi. Malachi had been mostly anonymous in the Bible, prophesying about his time and place, but also foretelling the savior. Ki was the normally soft-spoken younger brother who never questioned his older brother’s authority, but also was not fearful of becoming involved in things. He didn’t share his opinions unless asked to, although people in the family increasingly did ask him to.

               Aaron over-protected Ki. There was nothing else he felt he could do. This life was too hard and too short not to look out for the kin who were weaker through no fault of their own. None-the-less, even this attack—paired with other events recently—to show that their roles were shifting, and that he couldn’t protect Ki from things he couldn’t defeat himself.

               “I don’t have to Google frontier recipes for wolf meat to know what to do with it.” Mother scolded Ki openly, as she would anyone. “Predator been eating predator for many an eon, and you can Google that word, too. You take care of the hide.”

               Ki obediently left to separate the hide from the meat. Aaron lingered only a moment.

               “Ma,” he said, hesitating. “I missed the wolf.”

               “What do you mean? I see a dead wolf out there on the table.”

               He looked down. “I mean it came up behind me and I didn’t smell it, hear it, see it—I might be dead if not for Ki.”

               She set her knife—another home-made utensil—down on a well-worn white oak slab cutting board and wiped her hands on a calico apron. “I know you can’t protect him forever. Hell, the militia will probably get him pretty soon if they see what he is. But he’s growing up. He is grown up. Be grateful he was there with you.”

               Aaron’s gaze remained downward. “Yes, Ma’am.”

               No one was sure how Google continued to function on the web since Mountainview, California had been an inadvertent casualty of the war. One of the Russian missiles had missed its mark. Or maybe it was on purpose. None-the-less, people continued to rely on it, even without knowing a damn thing about who controlled it or made its algorithms function post-war. The rumor was that it wasn’t even humans that controlled it anymore; that it was just sort of running automatically on backup systems and generators hid in other places. Perhaps some sort of thing like AI.

               No one was sorry that Facebook and Twitter and such had gone away. On the contrary, after the war people didn’t want to connect with people on the other side of the globe. They wanted to do everything possible to avoid them, and not arouse their attention. Whether you DM’d your neighbor next door, or someone thousands of miles away, the Chinese hackers were always watching. Social media was physical death if you weren’t careful.

               Aaron thought a lot about these things, meaning that he wanted to know why social media had been such a big deal before, and why America had been so great before, but now there were only small bands of rebels hiding from Russian and Chinese satellites. He wanted to know why his uncle George kept going to Morehead City, North Carolina (Uncle George claimed that it was because a secret railroad and ocean port formerly run by the government were in operation there now under the control of rebels), but never came home with anything; he wanted to know why his father had left home with a local militia to fight some invaders from central America who thought it was better here (imagine that!) and never come back. That was who he was—he wanted to know things.

               Ki, on the other hand, he just wanted to “do.” Give him a task and he was on it. Give him a tool and he would figure out how to use it. History was lost on him.

               Aaron busied himself checking the settlement alarms. They had to be checked every night before dark, even though it was a foregone conclusion that a big white-tail buck, a raccoon, or someone would set one off in the middle of the night. He also checked the solar chargers. Since the war they were nothing short of pure gold—people could and would kill over them. The IR sensors were cannibalized from old television remotes.

               Aaron had Googled about electric cars, but he had never seen one in operating condition. Distilling was also big business to run ramshackle but functional combustion vehicles. That was the main thing for long trips. His Uncle Werner had an old Ford 150 that still somehow ran.

               Occasionally, they all three went to Cumberland, Maryland, which was the new, unofficial frontier capital. A city that had once had the potential to be the new Pittsburgh, instead became an early 21st century corpse of a city, with the infrastructure of a place much bigger, but the heart and soul of small town in Appalachia. The opioid epidemic destroyed what was left. The trains and steel mills were gone. Then the war came.

               Ironically, it was because it was geographically secluded from the major cities on the East Coast, and because it had that hardened infrastructure (outdated as it was), that it became the ideal place for people to quietly congregate and organize, while Chinese and Russian satellites still showed it as what it had always been before. The trees and mountains did not talk. They were careful not repair main roads; there were blackouts at night. Aaron liked some of the old brick buildings, some of which were up to ten stories high, with rusting fire escapes on their sides. He often wondered what it would have been like to live there one-hundred years or more ago in its heyday.

               “Aaron!  It’s time to eat!”

               “Instead of taking away our guns, they took away our government, and look at how great that turned out!”

               Uncle Werner stood with one foot up on a cedar stump and surveyed the motley gathering. Unlike his more fragile sister (Ki’s and Aaron’s mother), he was a lumberjack of a man in his early fifties with a shock of thick black hair that looked as wild as the New River. It sometimes looked like his buttons on his plaid shirt were going to pop and fly off like bullets. It was his week to address the neighborhood council, and informal news gathering session that was a highlight of an otherwise hard but sometimes boring life.

               “I’d rather have a government!” he continued.

               “We’re here for news!” a heckler in the background shouted. “Not political speeches!”

               “Well the news in Squirrel Hollow is the same as last week. Jerusalem artichokes, wild carrots, only this week the stew had wolf meat.”

               A little cheer went up amongst a few people. Killing a wolf was an all-too common occurrence; eating it was an ancient symbolic gesture of dominance.

               “And I don’t know about all of you, but we are running short on salt again. And the last time we went to Big Bone Lick there were well-armed outsiders. I plan to go to Cumberland this time.”