(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Of Traffic Jams, the Social Contract & AI [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-09-24 For years, I taught a World History course for 9th graders. Simple enough task; cover the activity of all humans, everywhere, from the beginning. I struggled with different ideas of how to get the course started but eventually decided to just strand them all on imaginary “fertile crescents.” I gave them standard outlines of the advancements that led humanity forward from Age to Age – Stone to Iron to crops to navigation to steam, airplanes, and internets. There may have been more, I forget, I’m aged. My point was that human progress relies on previous human progress; at our best we stand on the shoulders of giants. So I stranded them, in groups of three or four, in an imaginary land devoid of predecessory human endeavor. Their assignment was to pool their knowledge and see how much human progress they could recreate. Could they get beyond hunting and gathering? How does one smelt an ore, if an ore can be found? Farming is harder than mowing the grass, and steam? It’s hard enough to start a fire without matches, etc. Eventually most students grabbed a sharp stick and started looking for a cave, but they got my point, we have inherited a world made much easier by the work of those who came before us – the question I sent them home with was whether that inheritance brought with it responsibility. We are all links in the great chain of being, not being the weak link requires commitment, maybe even a social contract. I have always been fascinated by breaks in that chain, periods before we were so many and so interconnected. When societies rose and fell, and in falling, took some of their advancements with them. When my students reached the Gothic period, they were rightly impressed by the architectural genius of vaulted arches and flying buttresses, but shocked when I told them stories of those same architects visiting Rome and standing in utter amazement under the concrete vault of the Pantheon. When Rome fell, the recipe for concrete fell with it – without it, your buttress must fly. I read to my students from letters sent home by Napoleon’s troops describing the wonders of the pyramids, amazed at what had been accomplished so long ago. At least before they caught the plague and Napoleon abandoned them. The discussions from those classes caused me to wonder about our own society; what artifacts might we leave behind that could foster such amazement in future generations – what abilities do we have that we might take with us when we fall? Various ideas occurred to me, but nothing that would rise to the levels of concrete or pyramids. But then I drove home from work last week, on the Interstate, at rush hour, on a Friday, and I understood. Traffic. *insert dream sequence here* I had a vision of jetpack enhanced humans, touring the vast open-air National Parks of the 25th century, marveling at mile after mile of rusted, automotive remains parked neatly beside the long-overgrown roadways of Eisenhower’s Interstate system – exactly where their owners had left them when they had given-up, pulled over, and walked home. The future tourists floating over the ruins didn’t care about the cars, AI had cracked the (PHJPP) personal human jet pack propulsion technology centuries ago. What they were in awe of, what they couldn’t believe humans had once been capable of, was a functioning Social Contract – or what the park rangers told them had been called, “traffic.” Individual humans in analog vehicles, devoid of AI guidance, each with their own destination, had been able to cooperatively use common roadways to achieve travel. With nothing more than some reflective signage, blinking lights and the occasional hand gesture – humans had limited their own individual routes and speed to aid the safety and progress of others. They yielded, they merged; they even slowed for slow children ahead. The displays in the Welcome Center explained that historians believed the system began to fail in the mid 21st century. But exactly what had led to the Great Parking no one knew. There were numerous theories but no consensus. Some thought that a sudden shift in global chemistry led to a spontaneous failure of combustion, more recent opinions held that the collective unconscious simply collapsed under the pressure of too much empathy. From a distance of four centuries, it was unfathomable. The rise of the great blockchain cartels that dispersed the common AI had since alleviated humans of such needs. And once human characteristics could be monetized as non-fungible tokens, the struggle for meaning was best left to machine thought. Yet the tourists came, floating above remnants of an incomprehensible age – sensing an unintentional, almost chromosomal desire to gesture at the guy in the next jet lane…to signal a willingness to yield …awaiting a desire to merge. *end dream sequence* In the end, all we have are the people in the other cars. The most disturbing part of the Covid craziness were the people refusing to wear a mask arguing that it hindered their personal freedom. The social contract is not about an outside power demanding conformity, it’s a free embrace of the fact that we are not alone, that we are spared the horror of such an inhuman existence. Maybe rush hour traffic isn’t the obvious way to exemplify the great chain of being, and it’s easy to point out road rage to argue the opposite, but I know why people slow down when they see blue lights; one of us might be hurt. My proof? Of the thousands of freshmen I marooned over the years, not one of them asked for less people to help with the work. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/9/24/2195150/-Of-Traffic-Jams-the-Social-Contract-AI Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/