A Small Gain in Yardage

During the previous winter I had become rather seriously ill with one of those carefully named difficulties which are the whispers of approaching age. When I came out of it I received the usual lecture about slowing up, losing weight, limiting my cholesterol intake. It happens to many men, and I think the doctors have memorized the litany. It happened to so many of my friends. The lecture ends, "Slow down. You're not as young as you once were." And I had seen so many begin to pack their lives in cotton wool, smother their impulses, hood their passions, and gradually retire from their manhood into a kind of spiritual and physical semi-invalidism. In this they are encouraged by their wives and relatives, and it's such a sweet trap.

Who doesn't like to be a center for concern? A kind of second childhood falls on so many men. They trade their violence for the promise of a small increase of life span. In effect, the head of the house becomes the youngest child. And I have searched myself for this possibility with a kind of horror. For I have always lived violently, drunk hugely, eaten too much or not at all, slept around the clock or missed two nights of sleeping, worked too hard and too long in glory, or slobbed for a time in utter laziness. I've lifted, pulled, chopped, climbed, made love with joy and taken my hangovers as a consequence, not as a punishment. I did not want to surrender fierceness for a small gain in yardage... And in my own life, I am not willing to trade quality for quantity.

                                                                                     ~ John Steinbeck, Travels With Charley
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George Harrison and Bob Dylan, Concert for Bangladesh by Bill Ray.
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Winslow Homer, Gulf Stream
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The Perfect Lobby: How One Industry Captured Washington, DC

Many of America’s for-profit colleges have proven themselves a bad deal for the students lured by their enticing promises—as well as for US taxpayers, who subsidize these institutions with ten of billions annually in federal student aid.

More than half of the students who enroll in for-profit colleges—many of them veterans, single mothers, and other low- and middle-income people aiming for jobs like medical technician, diesel mechanic or software coder—drop out within about four months. Many of these colleges have been caught using deceptive advertising and misleading prospective students about program costs and job placement rates. Although the for-profits promise that their programs are affordable, the real cost can be nearly double that of Harvard or Stanford. But the quality of the programs are often weak, so even students who manage to graduate often struggle to find jobs beyond the Office Depot shifts they previously held. The US Department of Education recently reported that 72 percent of the for-profit college programs it analyzed produced graduates who, on average, earned less than high school dropouts.

Today, 13 percent of all college students attend for-profit colleges, on campuses and online—but these institutions account for 47 percent of student loan defaults. For-profit schools are driving a national student debt crisis that has reached $1.2 trillion in borrowing. They absorb a quarter of all federal student aid—more than $30 billion annually—diverting sums from better, more affordable programs at nonprofit and public colleges. Many for-profit college companies, including most of the biggest ones, get almost 90 percent of their revenue from taxpayers.

So why does Washington keep the money flowing?

It’s not that politicians are unaware of the problem. One person who clearly understands the human and financial costs of the for-profit college industry is President Obama. Speaking at Fort Stewart, Georgia, in April 2012, the president told the soldiers that some schools are "trying to swindle and hoodwink" them, because they only “care about the cash." Speaking off the cuff last year, Obama warned that some for-profit colleges were failing to provide the certification that students thought they would get. In the end, he said, the students "can't find a job. They default.... Their credit is ruined, and the for-profit institution is making out like a bandit." And, he noted, when students default on their federally backed loans, “the taxpayer ends up holding the bag.”

On March 14, the administration released its much-anticipated draft "gainful employment" rule, aimed at ending taxpayer support for career college programs that consistently leave students with insurmountable debt.

This rule would have a real impact: it would eventually cut off federal student grants and loans to the very worst career education programs, whose students consistently earn far too little to pay down their college loans, or whose students have very high rates of loan defaults.

But advocates believe that the standards in the proposed rule are too weak; they would leave standing many programs that harm a high percentage of their students. The rule , they argue, doesn’t do enough to ensure that federal aid goes only to programs that actually help students prepare for careers. But it isn’t soft enough to satisfy APSCU, the trade association representing for-profit colleges, which denounced the rule as the flawed product of a “sham” process. The administration gave the public until May 27 to comment before issuing a final rule.

APSCU and other lobbyists for the for-profit college industry are now out in full force, hoping to extract from the gainful employment rule its remaining teeth. Supporters of stronger standards to protect students from industry predation—among them the NAACP, the Consumers Union, Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, the Service Employees International Union and others (including, full disclosure, myself)—will push back, but they have far fewer financial resources for the battle. This is a crucial round in a long fight, one in which the industry has already displayed a willingness to spend tens of millions to manipulate the machinery of modern influence-peddling—and with a remarkable degree of success.

Because most of this lobbying money is financed by taxpayers, this is a story of how Washington itself created a monster—one so big that it can work its will on the political system even when the facts cry out for reform and accountability.

by David Halperin, The Nation |  Read more:

Image: Brian Ach / AP Images for DeVry University

Stone Mask (Amalito Culture), Argentina, c.1000 AD.
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Debunking Alcoholics Anonymous: Behind the Myths of Recovery

Myths have a way of coming to resemble facts through repetition alone. This is as true in science and psychology as in politics and history. Today few areas of public health are more riven with unsubstantiated claims than the field of addiction.

Alcoholics Anonymous has been instrumental in the widespread adoption of many such myths. The organization’s Twelve Steps, its expressions, and unique lexicon have found their way into the public discourse in a way that few other “brands” could ever match. So ingrained are these ideas, in fact, that many Americans would be hard-pressed to identify which came from AA and which from scientific investigation.

The unfortunate part of this cultural penetration is that many addiction myths are harmful or even destructive, perpetuating false ideas about who addicts are, what addiction is, and what is needed to quit for good. In this chapter, I’d like to take a look at a few of these myths and examine some of the ways they impair efforts at adopting a more effective approach.

MYTH #1: YOU HAVE TO “HIT BOTTOM” BEFORE YOU CAN GET WELL

This common myth essentially says that an addict needs to reach a point of absolute loss or despair before he or she can begin to climb back toward a safe and productive life.

The most common objection to this myth is simple logic: nobody can possibly know where their “bottom” is until they identify it in retrospect. One person’s lowest point could be a night on the street, while another’s could be a bad day at work or even a small personal humiliation. It’s not unusual for one “bottom” to make way for another following a relapse. Without a clear definition, this is a concept that could be useful only in hindsight, if it is useful at all.

A bigger problem with this notion is the idea that addiction is in some fundamental way just a matter of stubbornness or stupidity—that is, addicts cannot recover until they are shown the consequences of their actions in a forceful enough way. This is a dressed-up version of the idea that addiction is a conscious choice and that stopping is a matter of recognizing the damage it causes. I have said it before, but it bears repeating: if consequences alone were enough to make someone stop repeating an addictive behavior, there would be no addicts. One of the defining agonies of addiction is that people can’t stop despite being well aware of the devastating consequences. That millions of people who have lost their jobs, marriages, and families are still unable to quit should be a clear indication that loss and despair, even in overwhelming quantities, aren’t enough to cure addiction. Conversely, many addicts stop their behavior at a point where they have not hit bottom in any sense.

There is a moralistic subtext at work here as well. The notion that addicts have to hit bottom suggests that they are too selfish to quit until they have paid a steep enough personal price. Once again we get an echo of the medieval notion of penance here: through suffering comes purity. Addicts no more need to experience devastating personal loss than does anyone else with a problem. Yes, it can be useful when a single moment helps to crystallize that one has a problem, but the fantasy that this moment must be especially painful is simply nonsensical.

Finally, the dogmatic insistence that addicts hit bottom is often used to excuse poor treatment. Treaters who are unable to help often scold addicts by telling them that they just aren’t ready yet and that they should come back once they’ve hit bottom and become ready to do the work. This is little more than a convenient dodge for ineffectual care, and a needless burden to place on the shoulders of addicts.

by Dr. Lance Dodes and Zachary Dodes, Salon |  Read more:

Image: DonNichols via iStock/Salon

A Year With MI6: Working in Africa by James Hart Dyke
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Just Cheer, Baby

Lacy T. was born to cheer. When she dances, she moves at the speed of a shook-up pompom. When she talks, it's in a peppy Southern drawl that makes everything sound as sweet as sugar. And when she poses, she is the image of a classic pinup: big hair, tiny waist and full lips that part to reveal a megawatt smile.

Naturally, when Lacy auditioned for the Oakland Raiderettes a year ago, she made the squad. And the Raiderettes quickly set to work remaking her in their image. She would be known exclusively by her first name and last initial -- a tradition across the NFL, ostensibly designed to protect its sideline stars from prying fans. The squad director handed Lacy, now 28, a sparkling pirate-inspired crop top, a copy of the team's top-secret "bible" -- which guides Raiderettes in everything from folding a dinner napkin correctly to spurning the advances of a married Raiders player -- and specific instructions for maintaining a head-to-toe Raiderettes look. The team presented Lacy with a photograph of herself next to a shot of actress Rachel McAdams, who would serve as Lacy's "celebrity hairstyle look-alike." Lacy was mandated to expertly mimic McAdams' light reddish-brown shade and 11/2-inch-diameter curls, starting with a $150 dye job at a squad-approved salon. Her fingers and toes were to be french-manicured at all times. Her skin was to maintain an artificial sun-kissed hue into the winter months. Her thighs would always be covered in dancing tights, and false lashes would be perpetually glued to her eyelids. Periodically, she'd have to step on a scale to prove that her weight had not inched more than 4 pounds above her 103-pound baseline.

Long before Lacy's boots ever hit the gridiron grass, "I was just hustling," she says. "Very early on, I was spending money like crazy." The salon visits, the makeup, the eyelashes, the tights were almost exclusively paid out of her own pocket. The finishing touch of the Raiderettes' onboarding process was a contract requiring Lacy to attend thrice-weekly practices, dozens of public appearances, photo shoots, fittings and nine-hour shifts at Raiders home games, all in return for a lump sum of $1,250 at the conclusion of the season. (A few days before she filed suit, the team increased her pay to $2,780.) All rights to Lacy's image were surrendered to the Raiders. With fines for everything from forgetting pompoms to gaining weight, the handbook warned that it was entirely possible to "find yourself with no salary at all at the end of the season."

Like hundreds of women who have cheered for the Raiders since 1961, Lacy signed the contract. Unlike the rest of them, she also showed it to a lawyer.

by Amanda Hess, ESPN |  Read more:

Image: Chris McPherson

New York 2050: Connected, But Alone

There are so many of us now.

Two centuries ago, the urban bourgeoisie of Haussmann's Paris used the grands boulevards, the shopping arcades, as the stage on which to perform the identities they had chosen for themselves. We are no longer so limited.

People like us don't use streets. We can, we must, use space for houses. The broad sidewalks of Madison Avenue, the soft green of Central Park: all these, if we see them at all, are only shadows between skyscrapers: patches between the towers that have taken the place of crosswalks, of trees.

After all, we don't need them. Social media – now a quaintly antiquarian term, like “speakeasy” or “rave” – has been supplanted by an even bolder form of avatar-making. People like us needn't leave the house, after all. We send our proxy-selves by video or by holograph to do our bidding for us. Selves we can design, control. The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard once analysed the anxiety of choice, of the dizziness engendered by an infinite number of possibilities. “Because it is possible to create,” he wrote, “creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self … one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.” We know this is false. Of course we can create ourselves. We can look, act, enchant others, any way we like. We make ourselves in our own images.

At least, people like us do.

People like us have no limits. With so many avatars, we have no fear of missing out. We can be everywhere, every time. We simultaneously attend cocktail parties, dinners, fashionable literary readings, while going on five or ten dates with five or ten different men, who may or may not be on dates with as many women. All it takes is a click, and we've grown adept at multi-tasking. We sit within our white walls, in our windowless rooms, and project onto the barest of surfaces the most dizzying imagined backgrounds: Fifth Avenue as it once was, the Rainbow Room still intact, Coney Island before it sank into the sea. We project our friends and lovers, as they want us to see them, and know that somewhere, on their ceilings, we exist: the way we've always wanted to be.

The technology was invented in Silicon Valley, but it was in New York that it first caught on. In New York, where we were most wild for self-invention, where we were most afraid of missing out, where we were so afraid of being only one, lost in a crowd.

We fill up our hard drives with as many avatars, as many images, as we can afford. Demand has driven up the price of computer memory, and now this is where the majority of our money goes. The richest can afford as many selves as they like – any and all genders, appearances, orientations; our celebrities attend as many as a hundred parties at once. Though most of us still have to choose. We might have five or six avatars, if we're comfortably middle-class.

Still, we worry we've chosen wrong.

by Tara Isabella Burton, BBC |  Read more:

Image: Science Photo Library

Free of One’s Melancholy Self

When Jordan Belfort—played by Leonardo DiCaprio in a truly masterful moment of full-body acting—wrenches himself from the steps of a country club into a white Lamborghini that he drives to his mansion, moviegoers, having already watched some two hours of Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, are meant to be horrified. His addiction to quaaludes (and money, and cocaine, and sex, and giving motivational speeches) has rendered him not just a metaphorical monster but a literal one. He lunges at his pregnant wife and his best friend, played by Jonah Hill, and equally high; he smashes everything in his path, both with his body and with the aforementioned Ferrari. He gurgles and drools and mangles even monosyllabic words. He’s Frankenstein in a polo shirt.

But what of the movie’s glossier scenes? The one where Belfort and his paramour engage in oral sex while speeding down a highway? Where he and his friends and colleagues are on boats and planes and at pool parties totally free of the inhibitions that keep most of us adhering to the laws of common decency? What about the parts that look fun?

Everyone I spoke to post-Wolf (at least, everyone who liked it) rapturously praised Terence Winter’s absurd dialogue, DiCaprio’s magnetism, Scorsese’s eye for beautiful grotesquerie. Most of them also included a half-whispered, wide-eyed aside: What exactly are quaaludes, and where can we get some?

Often prescribed to nervous housewives, a quaalude was something between a sleeping pill and a sedative. First synthesized in the late fifties, by 1965 ’ludes were being manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., a Pennsylvania pharmaceutical company. The name “quaalude” is both a play on “Maalox,” another product manufactured by William H. Rorer Inc., and a synthesis of the phrase “quiet interlude”—a concept so simple and often so out of reach. Just whisper “quiet interlude” to yourself a few times. Seductive, no? It’s the pill in the “take a pill and lie down” directive thousands of Don Drapers gave their Bettys.

Of course, housewives have children who grow into curious teenagers, and medicine-cabinet explorations led the children of boomers to discover a new use for the drug. Most sedatives are designed to take you away within fifteen minutes, but—as Belfort explains in a lengthy paean to ’ludes—fighting the high leads one into a state almost universally described as euphoria. “It was hard to imagine how anything could feel better than this. Any problems you had were immediately forgotten or irrelevant,” said one person who came of age when ’ludes were still floating around. “Nothing felt like being on quaaludes except being on quaaludes.”

William James thought the world was made up of two halves: the healthy-minded, or those who could “avert one’s attention from evil, and live simply in the light of good … quite free of one’s melancholy self,” and the sick-souled, or morbid-minded, “grubbing in rat-holes instead of living in the light; with their manufacture of fears, and preoccupation with every unwholesome kind of misery, there is something almost obscene about these children of wrath.” In the end, to be of morbid mind is, according to James, the better option—the harsh realities the healthy-minded cheerily repel “may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth.” Still, it’s not easy, being a sick soul. James is one of the first persons to pop up in a search of “neurasthenia,” the catch-all term for those who suffered from nervousness, exhaustion, and overthinking in the nineteenth century.

Maybe William James needed a quiet interlude. Maybe something like a quaalude, something that makes you feel like yourself without any of the stress of actually being yourself, can be, for a healthy mind looking to spice up a Saturday night, something that enhances dancing and drinking and sex and honesty. But for someone like Jordan Belfort—whose desires beget more desires until he isn’t sure whether they’re real or if he’s wanting just to want—quaaludes were probably more an occupational necessity than a recreational getaway.

by Angela Serratore, Paris Review |  Read more:

Image: The Quaaludes featuring the DT’s album cover, 2011.

Paul Meleschnig
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Ryan Adams

Anouk Aimee and Jean-Louis Trintignant, A Man and a Woman (Claude Lelouch, 1966).

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Invisible World, Invisible Saviors

Human comprehension of biology has always been distorted by our innate occupation with organisms that are roughly the same size as us, and scientists have believed, until very recently, that organisms of our size are the most important ones for understanding life. Until the seventeenth century, the obvious impediment was our blindness to things smaller than fleas. The slight magnification of nature by Galileo’s friends at the Accademia dei Lincei—no more than a well-made hand lens can show us today—was nonetheless revelatory and soon, with the evolution of the microscope, the universe of microorganisms was laid bare. Prospects for intellectual recalibration began with these inventions, but the microscopic didn’t bleed into popular consciousness until the link between germs and disease was established in the nineteenth century. During my lifetime we have learned that a far greater repository of biological diversity exists among the unicellular organisms and the viruses than we find throughout the animal and plant kingdoms. Yet, even in the twenty-first century the majority of professional scientists are preoccupied with macrobiology. This is a problem for science and for our species.

Ecologists have exemplified this tension between the macro and the micro of biology. For more than 60 years, ecologists have been interested in understanding how the biodiversity within different ecosystems is determined. Throughout the twentieth century, the number of plant and animal species was viewed as the primary metric of biodiversity. Investigators identified a number of variables that influenced species richness, including climate, the heterogeneity of habitats within the ecosystem, and the abundance of solar radiation. Rain forests support lots of species because their climate is relatively uniform throughout the year, the trees and shrubs create an abundance of distinct habitats, and the sun shines year round. The stability of the ecosystem is another significant consideration. Some tropical forests are so old that evolution has had time to birth many of their younger species. (...)

By adding microbes to the public discourse we may get closer to comprehending the real workings of the biosphere and the growing threat to their perpetuation. Interest and indifference to conserving different species shows an extraordinary bias in favor of animals with juvenile facial features, “warm” coloration, “endearing” behavior (fur helps too), and other characteristics that appeal to our innate and cultural preferences. The level of discrimination is surprising. Lion cubs have almost universal appeal, and it must take a lifetime of horrors to numb someone to the charms of a baby orangutan. But we make subconscious rankings of animals of every stripe. Among penguins, for example, we prefer species with bright yellow or red feathers. The charismatic megafauna are very distracting, and the popularization of microbial beauty will require a shift in thinking, a subtlety of news coverage, a new genre of wildlife documentary. The ethical responsibility lies with the nations that are engaged in modern biology. (...)

Knowledge of the gut microbiome changes the balance a little. Our highly bacterial nature seems significant to me in an emotional sense. I’m captivated by the revelation that my breakfast feeds the 100 trillion bacteria and archaea in my colon, and that they feed me with short-chain fatty acids. I’m thrilled by the fact that I am farmed by my microbes as much as I cultivate them, that bacteria modulate my physical and mental well-being, and that my microbes are programmed to eat me from the inside out as soon as my heart stops delivering oxygenated blood to my gut. My bacteria will die too, but only following a very fatty last supper. It is tempting to say that the gut microbiome lives and dies with us, but this distinction between organisms is inadequate: our lives are inseparable from the get-go. The more we learn about the theater of our peristaltic cylinder, the more we lose the illusion of control. We carry the microbes around and feed them; they deliver the power that allows us to do so.

Viewed with some philosophical introspection, microbial biology should stimulate a feeling of uneasiness about the meaning of our species and the importance of the individual. But there is boundless opportunity to feel elevated by this science. There are worse fates than to be our kind of farmed animal.

by Nicolas P. Money, Salon |  Read more:

Image: AP/Agriculture Department

We’re Creating a New Category of Being

One of the unexpected pleasures of modern parenthood is eavesdropping on your ten-year-old as she conducts existential conversations with an iPhone. “Who are you, Siri?” “What is the meaning of life?” Pride becomes bemusement, though, as the questions degenerate into abuse. “Siri, you’re stupid!” Siri’s unruffled response—“I’m sorry you feel that way”—provokes “Siri, you’re fired!”

I don’t think of my daughter as petulant. Friends tell me they’ve watched their children go through the same love, then hate, for digital personal assistants. Siri’s repertoire of bon mots is limited, and she can be slow to understand seemingly straightforward commands, such as, “Send e-mail to Hannah.” (“Uh oh, something’s gone wrong.”) Worse, from a child’s point of view, she rebuffs stabs at intimacy: Ask her if she loves you, and after deflecting the question a few times (“Awk-ward,” “Do I what?”) she admits: “I’m not capable of love.” Earlier this year, a mother wrote to Philip Galanes, the “Social Q’s” columnist for The New York Times, asking him what to do when her ten-year-old son called Siri a “stupid idiot.” Stop him, said Galanes; the vituperation of virtual pals amounts to a “dry run” for hurling insults at people. His answer struck me as clueless: Children yell at toys all the time, whether talking or dumb. It’s how they work through their aggression.

Siri will get smarter, though, and more companionable, because conversational agents are almost certain to become the user interface of the future. They’re already close to ubiquitous. Google has had its own digital personal assistant, Google Voice Search, since 2008. Siri will soon be available in Ford, Toyota, and General Motors cars. As this magazine goes to press, Microsoft is unveiling its own version of Siri, code-named Cortana (the brilliant, babelicious hologram in Microsoft’s Halo video game). Voice activation is the easiest method of controlling the smart devices—refrigerators, toilets, lights, elevators, robotic servants—that will soon populate our environment. All the more reason, then, to understand why children can’t stop trying to make friends with these voices. Think of our children as less inhibited avatars of ourselves. It is through them that we’ll learn what it will be like to live in a world crowded with “friends” like Siri.

The wonderment is that Siri has any emotional pull at all, given her many limitations. Some of her appeal can be chalked up to novelty. But she has another, more fundamental attraction: her voice. Voice is a more visceral medium than text. A child first comes to know his mother through her voice, which he recognizes as distinctively hers while still in the womb. Moreover, the disembodied voice unleashes fantasies and projections that the embodied voice somehow keeps in check. That’s why Freud sat psychoanalysts behind their patients. It’s also why phone sex can be so intense.

by Judith Shulevitz, New Republic |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

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How Japan Copied American Culture and Made it Better

A couple of years ago I found myself in a basement bar in Yoyogi, a central precinct of Tokyo, drinking cold Sapporo beers with big foamy heads while the salarymen next to me raised their glasses to a TV displaying a fuzzy, obviously bootlegged video of an old Bob Dylan concert. The name of the bar, My Back Pages, is the title of a Dylan song. Dylan is, in fact, the bar’s reason for being: Japanese fans come here to watch his concert videos, listen to his tapes and relive the ’60s in America, a time and place almost none of them witnessed firsthand. As I heard yet another version of “Mr. Tambourine Man” roaring over the speakers, with some drunk Japanese fans now singing along, I thought how strange this phenomenon was.

The American presence in Japan now extends far beyond the fast-food franchises, chain stores and pop-culture offerings that are ubiquitous the world over. A long-standing obsession with things American has led not just to a bigger and better market for blockbuster movies or Budweiser, but also to some very rarefied versions of America to be found in today’s Japan. It has also made the exchange of Americana a two-way street: Earlier this year, Osaka-based Suntory, a Japanese conglomerate best known for its whiskey holdings, announced that it was buying Beam Inc., thus acquiring the iconic American bourbon brands Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark.

In Japan, the ability to perfectly imitate—and even improve upon—the cocktails, cuisine and couture of foreign cultures isn’t limited to American products; there are spectacular French chefs and masterful Neapolitan pizzaioli who are actually Japanese. There’s something about the perspective of the Japanese that allows them to home in on the essential elements of foreign cultures and then perfectly recreate them at home. “What we see in Japan, in a wide range of pursuits, is a focus on mastery,” says Sarah Kovner, who teaches Japanese history at the University of Florida. “It’s true in traditional arts, it’s true of young people who dress up in Harajuku, it’s true of restaurateurs all over Japan.”

It’s easy to dismiss Japanese re-creations of foreign cultures as faddish and derivative—just other versions of the way that, for example, the new American hipster ideal of Brooklyn is clumsily copied everywhere from Paris to Bangkok. But the best examples of Japanese Americana don’t just replicate our culture. They strike out, on their own, into levels of appreciation and refinement rarely found in America. They give us an opportunity to consider our culture as refracted through a foreign and clarifying prism.

by Tom Downey, Smithsonian |  Read more:

Image: Raymond Patrick

Elizabeth Warren - Minimum Wage, Corporate Welfare

Automated Ethics

For the French philosopher Paul Virilio, technological development is inextricable from the idea of the accident. As he put it, each accident is ‘an inverted miracle… When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane, you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution.’ Accidents mark the spots where anticipation met reality and came off worse. Yet each is also a spark of secular revelation: an opportunity to exceed the past, to make tomorrow’s worst better than today’s, and on occasion to promise ‘never again’.

This, at least, is the plan. ‘Never again’ is a tricky promise to keep: in the long term, it’s not a question of if things go wrong, but when. The ethical concerns of innovation thus tend to focus on harm’s minimisation and mitigation, not the absence of harm altogether. A double-hulled steamship poses less risk per passenger mile than a medieval trading vessel; a well-run factory is safer than a sweatshop. Plane crashes might cause many fatalities, but refinements such as a checklist, computer and co-pilot insure against all but the wildest of unforeseen circumstances.

Similar refinements are the subject of one of the liveliest debates in practical ethics today: the case for self-driving cars. Modern motor vehicles are safer and more reliable than they have ever been – yet more than 1 million people are killed in car accidents around the world each year, and more than 50 million are injured. Why? Largely because one perilous element in the mechanics of driving remains unperfected by progress: the human being.

Enter the cutting edge of machine mitigation. Back in August 2012, Google announced that it had achieved 300,000 accident-free miles testing its self-driving cars. The technology remains some distance from the marketplace, but the statistical case for automated vehicles is compelling. Even when they’re not causing injury, human-controlled cars are often driven inefficiently, ineptly, antisocially, or in other ways additive to the sum of human misery.

What, though, about more local contexts? If your vehicle encounters a busload of schoolchildren skidding across the road, do you want to live in a world where it automatically swerves, at a speed you could never have managed, saving them but putting your life at risk? Or would you prefer to live in a world where it doesn’t swerve but keeps you safe? Put like this, neither seems a tempting option. Yet designing self-sufficient systems demands that we resolve such questions. And these possibilities take us in turn towards one of the hoariest thought-experiments in modern philosophy: the trolley problem.

In its simplest form, coined in 1967 by the English philosopher Philippa Foot, the trolley problem imagines the driver of a runaway tram heading down a track. Five men are working on this track, and are all certain to die when the trolley reaches them. Fortunately, it’s possible for the driver to switch the trolley’s path to an alternative spur of track, saving all five. Unfortunately, one man is working on this spur, and will be killed if the switch is made.

In this original version, it’s not hard to say what should be done: the driver should make the switch and save five lives, even at the cost of one. If we were to replace the driver with a computer program, creating a fully automated trolley, we would also instruct it to pick the lesser evil: to kill fewer people in any similar situation. Indeed, we might actively prefer a program to be making such a decision, as it would always act according to this logic while a human might panic and do otherwise.

The trolley problem becomes more interesting in its plentiful variations. In a 1985 article, the MIT philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson offered this: instead of driving a runaway trolley, you are watching it from a bridge as it hurtles towards five helpless people. Using a heavy weight is the only way to stop it and, as it happens, you are standing next to a large man whose bulk (unlike yours) is enough to achieve this diversion. Should you push this man off the bridge, killing him, in order to save those five lives?

A similar computer program to the one driving our first tram would have no problem resolving this. Indeed, it would see no distinction between the cases. Where there are no alternatives, one life should be sacrificed to save five; two lives to save three; and so on. The fat man should always die – a form of ethical reasoning called consequentialism, meaning conduct should be judged in terms of its consequences.

When presented with Thomson’s trolley problem, however, many people feel that it would be wrong to push the fat man to his death. Premeditated murder is inherently wrong, they argue, no matter what its results – a form of ethical reasoning called deontology, meaning conduct should be judged by the nature of an action rather than by its consequences.

The friction between deontology and consequentialism is at the heart of every version of the trolley problem. Yet perhaps the problem’s most unsettling implication is not the existence of this friction, but the fact that – depending on how the story is told – people tend to hold wildly different opinions about what is right and wrong.

by Tom Chatfield, Aeon | Read more:
Image: James Bridle