Cold Fusion

Today I read that the Chinese are about to harness the sun in a fusion reactor. I also read that artificial intelligence is better at reading mammograms than expert radiologists.

Ain’t science great. All that cool math. The stars are literally the limit.

My two youngest sons were just home for the holidays. They’re math types. One is teaching his artificial intelligence algorithm to design women’s clothes in flattering styles based on body shape; beyond the runway and into everywoman’s closet. The other is developing the theoretical math to support an idea for a better way to keep international banks out of trouble, to sidestep future financial crises.

When I talk to them, I come away brimming with pride and hope. Pride in them, and hope for humanity. They’re just two young men, but they have their sights set high, and they’re going to do some good in the world. Many many others like them are out there now, dreaming of a better future.

Meanwhile, though, while the Chinese are cooking up controllable fusion, they are also refining the facial recognition and surveillance technologies that let them keep an eye on all their citizens. They plan to give each a citizenship score. I’m sure they’ll only use it to make people happier.

And as fast as my son works out better banking protection, thousands of others as energetic and purposeful as he are developing crypto currencies and shadow banking systems that are wide open in terms of risk because no one can really anticipate what might go wrong. It’s like the first time someone poured baking soda into a bottle of vinegar. Wow, that was unexpected…but pretty cool! Let’s do it again.

And while my other son is developing the programs to give women the power to design what they want to wear, the commercial engine of our culture—kicked into warp speed by the internet—is shaming them for being normal. Not too thin, not too fat, just normal.

And never mind about the hackers all over the world who are staying up nights to figure out how to steal our identities and shut down our power grids.

Tech is there for us. It’s a tool. Like the clubs that the chimps in Stanley Kubrick’s “2001, A Space Odyssey” picked up off the ground and began raging around with.

It’s pretty obvious that our tools are by now a long way from those simple clubs. I wonder, though, how evolved we, as humans, are from those chimps. I see today the same rage in us. Not all of us. Some of us are working to making the world better and safer and healthier. But the ones who just want to pick up a club and bash someone are still among us. And they may be a larger segment of humanity than we’re comfortable admitting.

So what happens when our tools become so powerful, as they perhaps already have, that a few of those rageaholics can do unimaginable damage with them?

We tell who we are with our stories.

I think of “By the Waters of Babylon,” by Stephen Vincent Benét, about simple people living in a wilderness on the edge of what had been a great civilization, the forbidden Place of the Gods. The adventurous protagonist ventures along the broken and deserted highways—the “God-Roads”—into the empty shell of New York City, destroyed by some force not known to him, or knowable by him.

I think of William Golding's “Lord of the Flies,” of the shockingly quick descent of normal adolescents into primitive rage. “Kill the pig, cut her throat, spill her blood.”

And when I do, I’m afraid we can't trust ourselves with our toys.