Human Agency

For those of us enamored of the Dune ethos,¹ I have a new commandment to add to the Butlerian Jihad: “Thou shalt not deny the agency of a human being.” This goes along with the broader and more restrictive, “Thou shalt not create a machine in the likeness of a human mind.” My addition, though apocryphal, completes the thought.

What do I mean by agency? First, it is the ability of a human being to act in all parts of life and includes by implication free will. Humans are free and unrestrained in what they may think, say, and do. This does not mean unbridled. The process of education and socialization that every human child undergoes includes lessons in what is right, proper, and true in thinking—which may vary from culture to culture. It includes lessons, sometimes painful lessons, in what is proper or discreet to say, and in what is right and proper to do. And again, these may vary from culture to culture and from setting to setting.

This commandment also does not imply that other humans may not take exception to the expressed thoughts, spoken words, and actions of other human beings. If one person’s free will and agency leads him to insult another, to break the posted speed limit, or to commit murder, there may be—sometimes must be—consequences. And the intelligent mind will weigh the probability of their occurrence and their outcome in the thinking that goes into speaking and acting.

Things that infringe upon and are an affront to human agency are enslavement and the narrow strictures that may be imposed by church, party, society, and state.

We resent enslavement because our will and our scope of action are denied to us: we can be punished, even killed, if we refuse to follow the orders of others in every aspect of life, even to valuing and caring for our families. Some humans may accept the orders and conventions imposed by the slave master as if they were laws to be obeyed. Sometimes they are laws, written into the statutes of the society that keeps slaves and protects slave owners. But those would then be laws against human liberty and agency, and so in violation of this commandment.

We may chafe under the strictures of a confining religious precept, the bounds of party loyalty, the adherence to social norms, or the laws and regulations of an administrative state that bind us with both demands to speak and perform in certain ways and injunctions on speech and action that we might want to take. With these restrictions of religion, party, society, and government, the threat against free agency is the consequence of being shunned by our co-religionists, removed from the party rolls, outcast from our family and friends, or losing our citizenship and in some cases receiving probation and jail time. We may understand the reasons and the reckoning in these cases, but the limits on our actions still chafe. Ultimately the individual must decide, as above, if the benefits of membership or citizenship are worth complying with the strictures. These conditions would not, however, be a violation of the commandment unless the penalty in all cases was imprisonment or death.

And yet … the religion, political party, social convention, or government statute that imposes too strict a set of conditions for membership must be aware of and weigh the risks it runs: internal revolt, structural revision, or mass renunciation by those who will not put up with the burdens of compliance. Every leader in every situation involving large numbers of human beings must calculate the risks and rewards of trying to impose too precise, complex, or complete a set of requirements on the people he or she intends to lead. Human beings are not puppets. They have eyes, ears, and minds, and those minds make decisions based both on the rules and promises they are given and on the consequences they can determine on their own. That is the fulcrum upon which human agency balances.

Recognition of and respect for individual human agency is the foundation of the principles of free thought, free speech, and free action. Without the one, you cannot have the others.

1. See my blog The Dune Ethos, from October 30, 2011.

Wiggle My Fingers

Have you ever thought about what a complex motion that is, wiggling your fingers?

The fingers don’t actually have any muscles to wiggle with. All the action is through tendons that pass across the palm and back of the hand, through the wrist, and up to small muscles, a pair for each finger—one for retraction, one for extension—in the forearm. And each of those muscles needs its own separate neural group in the brain’s motor strip, one for each hand in each hemisphere of the cerebral cortex.

That’s quite a lot of mechanism, and we use it in exquisite ways: typing on a keyboard, playing the piano, producing chords on the frets of a guitar and similar instruments, or finding just the right notes on a violin’s fingerboard, and drumming our fingers on the tabletop or arm of a chair when we are bored or nervous. We fiddle with our hair, and we wind or unwind a piece of floss or string. We use our fingers in a lot of ways.

But sometimes the nerves get crossed up. I noticed this recently when performing the third, or Naihanchin, kata in my karate practice. During this kata, there is a move where the practitioner steps across the body to the right and left sides while throwing an underhanded nukite, or open “spear hand,” palm-up across the body. To be performed correctly, the spear hand must have the fingers pressed together side-by-side and lead with the middle and two outside fingers, like the point of a spear or knife. But lately, when I do this move to the left, those three fingers twitch almost uncontrollably. Almost, because if I think about it, I can hold them steady. But if I don’t think, then they wiggle like eels.

I have also noticed that this almost uncontrolled twitching does not happen when I move to the right, or when I perform the spear hand in a forward thrust with the palm oriented vertically. It also doesn’t occur when I perform the same underhand move in the three opening side stances of the second kata, Seiuchin. Then my fingers remain pressed together and rigid, as they should, or sometimes slightly splayed apart—as the should not—but still stiff. It is only when bringing the hand across my body with the palm up in the third kata, stepping to the left, that the wiggle sets in.

This makes me think there must be something about the underhand move across the body while stepping to the left side that interferes with the nerves controlling those muscles in the forearm. It might be a binding in the neck, shoulder, or elbow. It might be a slight deterioration in the brain. If it were uncontrolled—that is, no effort on my part could keep them from wiggling—I would begin to worry. But for now I will accept that I need to focus my attention on that body part to keep it in line.

As I complete my 75th year—three quarters of a century, wow!—I begin to take note of such things. For about a decade, I haven’t been able to drop down onto one knee and pop back up, as required by several of the katas. I can no longer jump straight up from the floor and simultaneously fake with the right foot low, followed by a high kick with the left foot, before coming back down—as distinctly required in the fifth and sixth katas. (Truth to tell, that move became a hop-skip across the floor more than ten years ago.) Similarly, I keep track of the times I must grope for a word or a name, or the exact details of a memory—which doesn’t happen too often but is distressing when it does. And I sometimes have to take a step to the side, to regain my balance, when walking around a piece of furniture. Small lapses, bits of deterioration, but concerning.

Like all of us, I know that one day this marvelous “meat robot” that I am operating will finally cease moving. The heart will stop pumping, the lungs will no longer expand, and the nerves will begin to go silent. What happens then, I don’t know. Nothing, I expect. The same nothing that occupied this space and this mind before I was born. We are all ephemeral, all mortal, and that has been the human condition since we acquired conscious thought: our minds conceive of infinity and eternity; our body is fragile and finite. And that gives color to our existence.¹

And we are none of us the deacon’s “Wonderful One-Hoss Shay” of the Oliver Wendell Holmes poem: made in such a particular way that it lasted one hundred years and a day—and then disintegrated into dust. No, through the wonders of evolution, stem cells, and a functioning immune system, we grow and build substance from the beginning and up until a certain period of our lives, and then that substance is gradually eroded; the pieces no longer fit; the center releases its hold; and whole thing wears away to nothingness.

Hell, it’s a job.

1. I recall a sign I saw in a Facebook meme, I think from a British tattoo shop: “You are a ghost driving a meat-covered skeleton made of stardust. What do you have to be afraid of?” And another quotation, it might have been from C.S. Lewis: “You are not a body that has a soul. You are a spirit that has a body.” And then again, from the Puppeteer explaining their racial cowardice to Louis Wu in one of Larry Niven’s “Known Space” novels about the Ringworld: “We know that we have no undying part.” I am neural-networked software driving electro-molecular and mechanical hardware—and all three phases are extinguishable.

The Beam in Your Eye

I was reading about the James Webb Telescope, which was launched into orbit last year at the L2 LaGrange point—a stable orbital position on the other side of the Moon—and began producing stunning images of the farthest stars as well as our own system’s more distant planets. The interesting thing about the JWT is that it views the universe not in “visible light” but in lower and longer wavelengths—called “infrared,” or “below the red”—which we normally feel as heat.

And that got me thinking about what we call the visible spectrum, electromagnetic pulses or photons vibrating with a wavelength between 380 and 700 nanometers (billionths of a meter, abbreviated “nm”). These are the wavelengths that virtually all animals perceive, although some—such as the pit viper—can see or sense in the infrared, and many animals and insects can see a bit into the ultraviolet—or “beyond the violet.” But 380 to 700, going from red to orange to yellow to green to blue to indigo, seems to be the animal standard. After all, most of us walking on or using four limbs on land are related by an evolution that extends back to the stump-finned fishes who first crawled out of the swamps.

But why those particular wavelengths? Why can’t we perceive the world in the longer radio waves and microwaves, or in heat like the JWT, or in the much shorter x-rays and gamma rays? It would be useful to see in x-rays, because then we could look through doors and see who was on the other side.

Then I started to think about the nature of our bodies. Our cells, the components that make up all of our different tissues, are sized between 10 and about 120 micrometers (millionths of a meter, abbreviated “µm”). Just for reference, there are a thousand nanometers in a micrometer. And the rod cells in our retinas are about 2 µm in diameter. Taking about the middle of the visible spectrum, say 500 nm, somewhere deep in the shades of green, that means the cells in our eyes that perceive light are about four times wider than the wavelengths they are encountering.

That seems about right. If the cells were much smaller than the wavelength, they would likely miss parts of it. If they were much bigger, their exposed area would be redundant, and so their resolution—the ability to pack individual light-sensing cells into a given area of the eye’s retina—would be reduced. Smaller light-receiving points equals greater ability to see details, in the same way that smaller pixels in a photograph or on a monitor screen means sharper images.

In evolutionary terms, it is an advantage to be able to see in the same wavelengths as your prey or your nearest predator. Everyone is playing in the same field, so to speak, and no one—except maybe the pit viper or the bee, who are able to see in those outside wavelengths—has a clear superiority.

But the relationship of cell size to perceived wavelength tells me something else. If we eventually meet extraterrestrials, and they are approximately our size and have about the same cellular complexity, they will likely see mostly in what to us is the visible spectrum. If they are very large or very tiny, then all bets are off. But if they are sized about like us, then they will probably see in the same way we do.

And our size has everything to do with the internal composition and radius of our home planet—that is, the acceleration of our particular gravity. Creatures from much larger, rocky, and iron-filled planets with stronger gravity will likely be much larger. Their bigger structure would stand up to the greater pull. Or, conversely, they might be much smaller, flatter, less upstanding, more like starfish than bipedal creatures. Similarly, creatures from smaller, less dense planets with weaker gravity might be much smaller. Or, conversely, they might be larger, taller, and more willowy than sturdy, more like waving grasses.

But if they are about our size, with about our cellular complexity—which in humans numbers about 37 trillion cells of various sizes, but none larger than about 130 µm in diameter, the human egg cell—then they will likely be seeing the same landscape as we do.

And if the extraterrestrials are much larger than us—say, the size of an Ultrasaurus of the early Cretaceous—or much smaller—say, with the size and organization of a swarm of gnats—then again all bets are off. They might still perceive the world in the visible spectrum, but we would likely perceive them as some kind of animal.

The End of Locality

The Covid-19(20, 21 …) pandemic did it. The industrial world’s response did it. The internet and cloud computing did it. Zoom and other meeting apps did it. And we’re not going back.

And what is “it”? The notion that you have to live in a particular place, travel conveniently to a particular place, and meet in the flesh in order to get anything done.

Many social groups—think of book clubs, discussion groups, and online gaming—have already migrated to the internet. As a result, members can move away from an area and still participate, and they can do everything except share snacks and a glass of wine together. My own wargaming group, which used to meet in person around a table in somebody’s spare room, now includes members in Connecticut, Wyoming, Texas, and New Zealand. And every game has a Zoom component with an overhead camera and an open laptop for extra-local participation.

The internet and cloud computing showed that a knowledge worker—think of accountants, customer service representatives, programmers, technical writers, corporate lawyers, and all kinds of middle managers—can work from anyplace in the country, not just within commute distance of the corporate or local office. The old desire of bosses to see people at their desks to know they were working is now thoroughly eroded. We have measures, other than observing heads and hands positioned over keyboards, to show a person’s productivity.

Even jobs with high-level customer contact, like consultants and big-ticket sales reps, will eventually be done with a minimum of travel and facetime (lowercase, to distinguish it from the Apple communication app of the same name) and maximum delivery by internet connection and online meeting. Soon enough, even the most prosaic of information jobs, like those at the point-of-sale, such as cashiers and checkout operators, will either be performed online—or automated entirely. Right now, checkout in many grocery and warehouse stores is supplemented if not replaced by self-checkout stations. And much of retail has already moved online to services like Amazon.com and to a flurry of web-enabled sellers and supplements to brick-and-mortar retail stores.

In time, the only jobs that cannot be done through telepresence will be those that require a person’s hands to be placed directly on the actual, physical customer—such as radiologists, physical therapists, and dentists. Routine doctor’s visits, tests other than showing up somewhere to give blood or a biological sample (many of which can be sent through the mail), consultations, and almost all forms of psychotherapy can now be done online. Even surgery can be performed remotely using robotics and laparoscopy. And remote robotics paired with artificially intelligent expert systems may eventually take over some of the hands-on work. When that capability is fully developed, even the human knowledge worker may drop out of the system entirely.

Many of the customer-service jobs, especially in finance and insurance, are already handled by artificial intelligences, either as a chatbot on a website or an automated voice on the telephone. The expert system usually works by a combination of menu choices and pre-recorded, spoken commands, and the system only routes to an online human agent when it meets a response it cannot either interpret or fulfill.

One of the many things that will surely change in this future is the way we vote, especially after the claims and lingering suspicions about errors and confusion (and the possibility of fraud) in the 2020 and 2022 elections.

As we learned from the lawsuit brought in 2022 by Kari Lake about the election process in Maricopa County, Arizona, local law there allows citizens to cast their ballots at any precinct voting station in the county, not just in their own hometown. Since every district has a slightly different ballot—accounting for choices among city offices and school boards—each voting station had to stand ready to print out hundreds of different ballot forms to meet the walk-in demand. And on election day, some of the electronic ballots were sized for a different length of paper than what was actually loaded in the printer, so those ballots could not be read by the tabulating machines at the polling station. The result was confusion, photocopying of the voter’s ballot, chain-of-custody issues, and the suspicion of fraudulent intent.

Come on, people! We’re still using paper? And we’re relying on paper information being scanned into to electronic machines? What is this—the 20th century? We’re well beyond that!

When I do important transactions with an institution over the internet, I have a login protocol with a unique password that I have previously established. They still often require me to give the number of my mobile phone—which is personal to me and protected by a passcode or facial recognition software—and then they send me a one-time numeric code to key into the required box. Only then can we proceed with the transaction. If that system is secure enough for banking and insurance business, it should be secure enough for voting.

If we could securely vote over the internet, it would be another blow to the concept of showing up at a particular time in a particular locality. The voting system would recognize you, ensure your identity, provide you with the appropriate ballot based on your primary residence, tabulate your vote, and then lock you out of the system to prevent multiple voting attempts. (Eventually, voice recognition from a previously submitted and verified sample will replace the more complicated passing back and forth of phone numbers and numeric codes.) The voting process will then be accessible from anywhere on the planet and not require you to be present in your home district on a particular day. It would ensure that everyone voted just once. And it would allow the voting period to be extended for, say, a whole month and still have the results tabulated and counted instantly.

By now in the cycle of development, you have probably already met and worked with robots and intelligent systems in a variety of settings, with good results or sometimes not. The process of moving information transfer from face-to-face to face-to-bot will only accelerate in the coming years, as artificial intelligence and expert systems expand. It’s a new world out there, with new protocols for the way we work and interact.

Another Doorway

Another trip around the Sun. Another race that’s just begun. And so we pass through another doorway.¹

The past year was pretty good for me. I published one book, Revolt on the Iron Planet, and started two more. Those new novels are progressing slowly, and the pace of my blog postings has also slowed down. I don’t know if this is age creeping up on me or distraction with other events, but it is so.

I dropped, dumped, tipped over—whatever—two motorcycles in the fall, with significant reparable damage to each but no significant injury. I then sold out of my bikes entirely—and almost immediately bought one of them back. So my mind, for better or worse, remains changeable if not malleable. I have come to accept that my continued riding will be a test of my skills, judgment, reflexes, balance, and endurance. And it’s just fun: I come back from each ride relaxed and exhilarated.

I continued to exercise and try to manage my weight. I had no significant health issues, except for a molar with some “resorption,” which means a breakdown in the root dentine that usually calls for root canal. This tooth couldn’t be saved, however; so I had it extracted right before New Year’s Eve and am in line for an implant.

I had no significant attachments or detachments in my personal life. And after my fifth year alone, I still miss my late wife Irene. So I do have some human feeling left, I guess.

What will 2023 bring? And am I ready for it?

The good news is that California seems to be in for a wet winter, and we need the water after several years of drought. The bad news is that my condo complex is coming up on fifty years old, and we have to deal with a number of leaks, both externally because of the rain and internally because of the aging plumbing. But the structure is sound.

The bad news internationally is that, from this perspective, Russia seems determined to continue its war of attrition, destruction, and death against Ukraine. With the abduction of thousands of Ukrainian children and indiscriminate murder of adults, the Russian goal seems to be depopulation in favor of occupying a barren land as a buffer against the West. That’s old-style thinking and, also, inhuman. But that seems to be the whisper inside Vladimir Putin’s head. Either Ukraine will disappear, or he will.

The further bad news is that Chairman-for-Life Xi Jinping seems also to be listening to bad whispers. First, he locked down his country to fight a weakened virus—and also to punish economic areas that might defy him. Then, after a spate of protests that did not look to topple his regime, he removed all precautions and opened the borders. The trouble with any system that returns all thought and inspiration to one great leader is that you have no checks and balances if he’s wrong, or delusional, or just plain out of touch. And the correction mechanisms include a lot of bystander deaths. Either Xi will disappear, or China will.

At home, the country remains fairly evenly divided between conservative, populist, traditionalist homebodies and progressive, centrist, daring radicals. Each side of the aisle appears to hold less than 51% or 52% of the seats in the House and Senate and governorships across the nation. Such division can be a useful thing, because neither side can effect crushing change against the other. It is also useful if it forces negotiation and compromise to get anything done. And it can be useful, at least to the traditionalist side, if it keeps the government from undertaking radical changes that half the population doesn’t want. But then, spinning your wheels and hurling invectives that will change nobody’s mind are exercises in wasted energy.

On the economy, I don’t think anyone knows what’s going on. We have persistent inflation and a Federal Reserve that is pledging to fight it with the tools at hand—interest rates. But we also have a constrained supply system, chaos in international trade and shipping, a tight labor market, and collapsing retail, housing, and infrastructure sectors … all while the federal government spends more and more of the money it does not have, hampering the Fed’s moves. The stock market, which I watch daily, gyrates between hope and fear, and experts are predicting a deep recession, a “soft landing,” and a bull market in 2023. Nobody knows. And all the adults seem to have left the room.

The failure of one crypto trader, who may have been attempting a Ponzi scheme and might just be a moron, demonstrated to most financial experts that a currency backed by nothing, except perhaps a large and indecipherable number, is actually backed by nothing—and worth every penny. I’ll try a lot of new things in the name of technical advancement; cryptocurrency and day trading are not among them.

The pandemic seems to have morphed into a more transmissible but less severe form. That is the way of all successful viruses: infect as many people as possible, in order to increase the presence of viral particles; cripple or kill as few people as possible, because an incapacitated or dead person cannot spread those particles; and mutate constantly to overcome the tenacious human immune system. This is evolution in action, and the winners of all time are a subset of coronaviruses and the rhinoviruses, both responsible for the common cold: easily transmitted, no more than an inconvenience, and present in everyone’s nose. But we still have some unsettling, lingering effects of Covid-19, including brain fogs and systemic weaknesses. So the story is not written yet.

The whole experience of the pandemic disrupted many of our systems—economic, social, cultural, and political. It closed down vulnerable businesses and advanced the cause of work from home for those whose functions allowed it—think of well-paid knowledge workers as opposed to low-paid service workers. It made people hesitant to gather in large groups, and so changed our habits for meeting in forums and clubs, going to movies, and other social encounters. It ended a bias toward locality: with internet connections and Zoom calls, groups and organizations can now entertain national and even international participants. And the pandemic pretty well changed the voting process, from a single day to show up and mark your ballot in the booth, to a month-long affair of mail-in ballots, chain-of-custody surveillance, and endless squabbles about counting. Some things will go back to normal in 2023 after the pandemic, and some things will remain forever changed.

So the drama continues. Cheers!

1. See my blog from last year at this time: Janus, God of Doorways from January 2, 2022.