It is All Relative

Anyone, even some among us with very little ability to observe or afflicted with the direst form of apathy or have the least amount of curiosity, knows that everything around us can only be perceived relative to everything else.  This will not be a lecture on Albert Einstein’s theory because very few people in the world understand it - I am not one of them – but we can spin something from it to make it more practical or give it worldly relevance, where the stark reality of anyone’s station in life is viewed relative to where everyone else stood.

Just very briefly, let’s pick up just one little bit from how the great scientist actually thought.  He was not brilliantly eccentric if it were not for thinking what at that time, perhaps still true even today, the most far out suppositions and conjectures.  He made us imagine a ball traveling at very high speed through empty space: dark and devoid of anything else; i.e. no stars, hence no light, no air, no dust, just plain void of nothingness, except for the constantly (fixed velocity) speeding ball. Now imagine it is a large transparent ball, like glass, and you’re inside traveling with it.  How can you tell you are actually moving? You cannot. In fact, you will not know how fast you are moving nor can you know what direction you are moving to or from. And get this. You will be oblivious to the surrounding space even if you are traveling at the speed of light – 300,000 km/hr. Come to think of it, you will not even know that you are moving to anywhere at all. [Only way you can is if your speed changes, i.e., you slow down or speed up even more or if you can see other objects around you with which to base an observation]. The same way you can’t tell seated inside a 747 doing 400 mph, except when it picks up speed for takeoff or slows down to land].

Now, back to the real world. As little as we know or understand Einstein’s theory, this we can be sure: Everything is relative. How does a young baby recognize his mother and father? They look and sound different relative to other people.  This is of course started by first recognizing people to be different from the other things around that move – like the pet dog or cat. There is nothing flippant or glib about that. The baby’s brain was an empty slate from birth and it has to learn all the things that stimulate it.  It begins quickly to recognize objects that don’t move from those that do.  Notice how quickly they are bored once there are no movements, sounds or changing colors around them. They’d recognize shapes and the size of the shapes because, well, something is different, larger or smaller, softer or harder, relative to something else.

From then on the baby has grown to be about seven years old.  By now his perception of a lot of things has grown substantially larger over what it was when he was three or four.  He’s bigger now but he must recognize quickly there are bigger boys out there.  He establishes his position relative to the younger, little ones and to those taller and twice his weight.  By his teenage years, he now recognizes not only his own social status but where his family is in the hierarchy by which his parents, their peers, or not-so-peers, stood.  Relativity begins to manifest some of its darker sides.  He cannot have a car even at his junior year in high school when some of his classmates do.  When finally a used car came along by the middle of his senior year, some of the same classmates were getting brand new ones ahead of a graduation gift. It is obvious that relative to his parents some of his classmates’ families have relatively more to spare, which made the difference between a used car and a brand new one.

If only, just before graduating he had widened his perspective to a larger focus.  If only he had done a thought experiment that took him to a neighborhood far, far away. There he would have seen a similarly populated high school, say, in a suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh, where even the principal of the school drives a car a decade older than his.  There, students from the middle class would be fortunate to own a bicycle, whose father, the bread winner, is still 30 months away from paying off the scooter he drives to work which by now belches smoke as to render it unsuitable to drive through the city streets in a couple of years; or less if the environmental police catches up to him with a citation.

It is all relative.

My son and daughter-in-law traveled to Russia years ago but not to the tourist attractions in Moscow, not even Nizhny or Rostov-on-Don. They went on a church mission to some of the poorest areas in a remote Russian region.  My daughter-in-law who was then a high school teacher had seen her U.S. students come to school in name-branded or sports-emblemized back packs filled with new text books and more than ample school supplies.  In that Russian town they saw young students come to school with their books and school supplies in plastic bags, notably no different from what we see in grocery stores in many parts of the well developed world.  The kids were happy to have those grocery bags to keep their books dry and protected from the elements, with simple hand straps, clutched by tiny fingers to hold on to what momentarily are prized possessions in their young lives.  There were no school buses.  Every student walked to and from school.  We can only imagine what it was like when the weather turned into the famous Russian winter.

It is all relative.

When western tourists go on their yearly sojourn to the Far East or South America, they may think nothing of a $2 or $5 tip but to the waiter or bell hop or driver, it could mean crossing the threshold from a hand-to-mouth existence to an albeit temporary relief from the following day’s worry or uncertainty in case he or she misses work for one reason or another.  The tourists, regardless of their social standing from whence they came, are assured by relativity in a foreign land a place far more special than they can ever imagine, if only they can know how these people who serve and cater to their needs live - in homes these strange but, relatively or seemingly, wealthy visitors will never see.

Back home the same tourists return to the reality of their daily existence in a world so different from the grand but short intermission.  It will take a while for them to re-adjust and realize that the daily stage show they must begin to resume is the actual reality of their lives and the vacation was merely the entr’acte, according to the French among us. Now, in not so frequent a case, which most of us should be grateful for, post vacation seems to bring on more stress than had there been no vacation at all even though such joyous trips are supposed to relieve them of it.  It does not seem to matter that there is a job to go back to, to a home taken for granted in a neighborhood that looks the same.  Well, if they must, they ought to re-imagine what that home in such a neighborhood would look to those folks that catered to their needs and serve them well in that foreign land not too long ago. The seemingly tired, old neighborhood, the house that could use new furnishings even when they’re perfectly fine, would be heaven to those 767 million people of the world’s population in extreme poverty who subsist on a meager $1.90 a day (2016 world survey) or to those 2.1 billion who get by on $3.10 per day.

It is all relative.

Albert Einstein may have inadvertently taught us something else. We can learn from our own personal Special Theory of Relativity.  Treat whatever we have or where we are today, as something special because relative to much of the world - many of whom do not have an electronic device to read this, let alone electricity by which to power it - we live relatively well.

What Part is That?

Beth Madden, of Seattle, Washington submitted the following conversation to “Life in These United States”:

I came home to find my husband sitting on the couch watching TV.

“I thought you were going to mow the lawn,” I said.

“I’m waiting on a part,” he replied.

“What part is that?”

“The part of me that wants to do it”.

That conversation is reprised in a variety of different ways not just across the U.S. but around the world, although the chore of mowing the lawn is primarily or mostly American. In many parts of the world mowing the lawn is not likely something to be argued about. Only in America is lawn care more obsessively a part of suburban living while much of the world is probably oblivious to the idea of actually watering, let alone care so much for how the front and back yard grass look.

 “In a 2005 NASA-sponsored study, it was estimated that the area covered by lawns in the United States to be about 128,000 square kilometres (49,000 sq. miles), making it the nation's largest irrigated crop by area. [1] Lawn care is thus a popular business in the United States; proper maintenance, construction and management of lawns of various kinds being the focus of much of the modern horticulture industry. Estimates of the amount spent on professional lawn care services vary, but a Harris Survey put the total at $28.9 billion in 2002 (approximately $1,200 per household using such services)”.

According to the EPA, "of the 26 billion gallons of water consumed daily in the United States, approximately 7.8 billion gallons, or 30 percent, is devoted to outdoor uses. The majority of this is used for irrigation."

I digressed there for a minute as an aside because Beth Madden indeed has brought up the subject that most Americans are familiar with although there is something far more profound about her question, “What part is that?”, which could trigger all kinds of things in life and human nature.

For example, what part is someone waiting for to embark on a business venture, a career change, or a commitment to do something that is outside of one’s comfort zone. Some have conjectured that perhaps Princess Diana may have waited for far too long for that part of Prince Charles that could have loved her deeply. Could things have turned out more differently, such as, that she could still be alive today had that part come to the prince in time? A wishful hypothetical for the millions of fans of the beloved princess but in reality there are actual people out there today under similar circumstances waiting for the part of someone they love to arrive in time to save a relationship.

Waiting for that part, in my opinion, could very well be also the father of invention. [Should I have said, “Mother of invention”?].  Let’s get back to mowing the lawn for a minute.  The first lawn mower, a huge improvement over a scythe, was something that needed to be pushed for the cutters to cut. I’m sure back then there were men and women, primarily husbands, of course, waiting for the part where a motor can do the rotating.  A gas-engine powered mower was invented but that wasn’t enough because more folks waited for the part when… well, ultimately somebody invented the self-propelled version. But do you know that someone out there, today, is still waiting for the part where the mower, on a programmed schedule, will start itself, motor out of the garage or storage shed, cut the lawn, edge, and trim the whole yard – all by itself.

"Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation", a very technical sounding but accurate definition of LASER, was early on a mere curiosity but was an invention waiting for a part.  And what an abundance of parts showed up! Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity could easily have been something relegated to the annals of obscure technical publications or discussed only in rarely held theoretical physics conventions if not for the fact that engineers have all been waiting for the part or parts that came with it. Today’s GPS, smart phones, live global TV broadcasts, more accurate tracking of celestial objects, future space exploration, to name a few, depend on that theory to hold true – always.

What possessed the Wright brothers to go from building/repairing bicycles to take to the air with the first airplane?  Soichiro Honda was a high school dropout mechanic who was turned down by Toyota when he applied for what he considered then his dream job.  Fortunately, for the world there were many parts of him that wanted to do more. After building makeshift mopeds from post WWII spare parts in war-ravaged Japan, his company’s cars and minivans are some of the most reliable vehicles today. The company now builds robots, [yes] lawn mowers, portable electric generators and even jet engines.

What part of Melinda Gates made her pick up a skin-and-bones African woman suffering from AIDS, then carried her to the roof top of the clinic so the dying patient can see her last sunset?  What part of the firefighter made him go back one more time into a burning building to save one more life? What of a soldier diving over a grenade to save his comrades?  These are people who did not wait for the parts of them to come along by acting instinctively towards what is good and right in their eyes and in their minds; and in their hearts.

The question for many of us is how do we know what part of us is still waiting to come out. The youth is likely the reservoir of many parts.  We can say that it is those who are good at coaxing these parts to come out who lead successful lives.  Such successes are not always measured by money and material possessions but by the depth with which these folks went down to retrieve the parts.  

The part easily dug out is not always the most meaningful. The part that matters the most is when one had to dig deepest from his or her heart, especially in the midst of adversity, hardship and sacrifice.  Lastly, at the end of our life’s journey the best time to reply, “NOTHING”, is when asked, “What part of us have we forgotten to bring out”.

As Luck Would Have It

Fortune had been showered upon you to be living today. Nothing facetious about that whatsoever because today, as we speak, or rather, as you are reading this musing, consider yourself one of approximately 7 billion who each comes from a very long line of continuously unbroken chain of connected lives that span a very, very long time. It is continuously unbroken because had there been a break, just once, in that chain, at some point, or any point along that span of tens and thousands of years, you will not be here. 

Here's why.  From a set of two people - your parents - your mother gave birth to you not too long ago.  Before that, two sets of parents (four different people) brought up the two persons who became your father and mother. You go back another generation and now we're talking four sets of parents - eight people in all - from your past who had something to do with you being here. If you go back just a little bit more, you will count 16, then 32, then 64 who were in that chain in just another additional three generations. Imagine a very long funnel and you’re at the bottom tip of it today. Tracing upwards you will have a wall of people lining the sides of the funnel stretching almost endlessly to an unimaginably flared top. Markers of your DNA will extend in an unbroken band stretching to however farther back your imagination will take you.  There is something truly staggering about this, but let's digress for a bit in the next paragraph.

The Chess Board Story

There are quite a number of different versions of this tale but we’ll pick one from India since that is where chess likely originated. It’s about a king, a chess master, who challenged one visitor to a game.  The challenger when prompted what he wanted as a reward after he bested the king, merely asked that a single grain of rice be put on the first square of the chess board. Two grains on the next, then doubling that on the third square, which are four grains…then doubling it again to eight, and so on and on until the 64^th square. The king thought nothing of it and agreed, not realizing that he was faced with the classic effect of exponentials.  Just by the 40^th square there would have been 1 billion grains, but still manageable and well within what the king had in his vast granaries. The king’s accountants soon realized that by the 64^th square the number of grains of rice amounted to 18 followed by 30 zeros (18³⁰ grains).  That amount of rice would have weighed 210 billion tons, enough to cover all of India with a layer one meter thick. Assuming just ten grains of rice on a stalk per square inch, a rice field twice the area of the entire surface of the earth, oceans and lakes included would have been required for planting.

Two things we learn from that story: (a)from the second paragraph above, you will see that there had to have been some serious overlap in our ancestry because there could not have been that many people to have lived if each individual among 7 billion people today traces his or her lineage just to one discretely single funnel; (b) often people, even experts in their field, would use the word exponential, i.e. exponential growth, profits will grow exponentially, etc., not realizing what they’re talking about, so tread lightly when using that word, except to use it metaphorically but often one cannot resist and even add “literally” to it.

To further explain what I just said from the last sentence, imagine going back just 60 generations before you were born.  The doubling effect of parents of parents of parents would require an exponential number of people if we merely account a single line of ancestry.  Therefore, it is only conceivable that a great number of people in every race and mixed races could trace their ancestry to a relatively much smaller number of original individuals. Another way is to imagine that you, as an individual, were at the tip of an ancestral pyramid, which you are, and you project backwards in time the number of people from whence you came through the doubling phenomenon of parenting.  By the 64^th generation the base of the pyramid would exceed the diameter of the entire solar system if all the people involved with you were from a single linage if they stood shoulder to shoulder on a straight line.

Therefore, we must conclude that we all came from a very narrow ancestral base.  All Europeans, for example, have common DNA markers in each and every one of them, distinctly European, because there had to have been just a handful of original parents.  It is almost as if there was a proverbial Adam and Eve but mind you, not in the literal sense.  We can say the same for those from Asia, the Middle East and Africa, of course.  People in every race are likely related to one another and there is more likelihood than not that all races are related as well.  Allow for migration patterns, allow enough time (as in several thousand years), and allow for the fact that changing geology dictated climate patterns that dictated the concentration of food and shelter, biological adaptations, cultural and sociological evolution, etc. the odds of people mixing, separating, reuniting, exploiting one another through wars and even local conflicts, and do not forget that we are confined to one earth –though large and widespread it is still a finite area – the odds of people “bumping into one another” completes the recipe for the proverbial “melting pot”.  We cannot know all the details but the math tells us that there could not have been that many people in our ancestry to have allowed for truly discrete “originals”. I could be wrong but not by much if we keep in mind that the numbers are not there for you to have come from a single line without ancestral “entanglements” in the past.

But what has “as luck would have it” got to do with all of what had been said so far?

Everything!  In order to cover every reader we will either make this about the odds of you making it thus far as just mere fortuitous results of probabilities or as an acknowledgement that the Creator, as many of us believe, has a hand in how and why we made it this far; however, God did not exactly make it that easy for every ancestor.  Just think this through.  At any time along the chain, a break could have occurred because of diseases, famine, accidents, death through war, enslavement, natural catastrophe, etc. Of course, either none of those happened or you owe it to your ancestor’s skill, genetics or luck because you are here now.

The biology of creating you, and each and every ancestor before you, was always fraught with all kinds of obstacles. From the moment of conception the struggle for survival, even at the microscopic level of fertilization, is no picnic for the fertilized egg. Let’s back up for a bit because before that, anywhere from 40 to 120 million sperm cells initiated the journey with only a few hundred making it anywhere near the egg which by comparison is not only a hundred fold bigger than the sperm it is actually a cellular fortress.  As luck would have it, one sperm cell out of the remaining few hundred will make it through and the fortress shuts down and fertilization begins. The fertilized egg must then make an epic journey from the fallopian tube to the uterus (womb) when at that point it is still considered a foreign body and can be rejected at any moment. As luck would have it, the fertilized egg reaches its destination and will cling to the lining of the uterus like a parasite, which it is, and must remain there for nine months totally dependent on nutrition from every ancestral mother. Occasionally the fertilized egg will not get it right and an ectopic pregnancy may occur thus making the whole journey for naught. Many generations ago under primitive pre-natal care, or perhaps even none at all, the odds were not too favorable to the infant or mother.  But, as luck would have it, your ancestors made it and here you are.

Furthermore, as luck would have it, the blueprint of you was intact and followed to the letter throughout your entire development as an embryo to final term.  Here is the thing.  The smallest and latest computer chip available in the market is phenomenal relative to its predecessors. It is small and thin all right but we can still clearly see it, hold it and examine it. It holds a lot of information but not quite as much – not even close - as the information carried in the fertilized egg.  If the egg that is just a mere 100 microns in diameter (a millionth of a meter) were scaled to the size of a shirt button, the latest microchip, proportionately scaled, would be about as large as the Houston Astrodome. But, as luck would have it, your mother’s natal CPU (central processing unit) read all the information correctly so that you have the right hair and eye color, your limbs were complete, all your organs developed in the programmed sequence and upon your birth, not only did you successfully inhale your first mouthful of air outside the womb, you bellowed with a loud cry that also made your mother cry for joy.

As luck would have it, you and 7 billion others are each at the tip of unbroken chains of life.  But keep in mind that of all the species that ever lived from since the time life begun only less than 1% are in existence today.  99% became extinct for many reasons. The fact that our species are still around is something to behold, and we add to that the reality that our ancestry had been so entangled in so many ways for so long over eons of time that we could all be related – one way or the other. Unfortunately, there is a “but” that follows. Because as bad luck would have it, human frailty and the nature of the human character seems to prevail throughout, from history to history. If anything, we had proven that human life is persistent; we persisted on developing, understanding and always aiming to elevate the human spirit; yet, the most important question still remains unanswered: Why is our history filled with human conflict, theaters of war in the same battlefields over and over again and again - our future is pre-dominated by wars and rumors of war?

Hopefully, as luck would have it, we will somehow find a way before our luck runs out.   

The Age-Old Phenomenon of Aging

If I were to chart the phenomenon of aging it would be a bell curve or normal distribution curve.  The top of that curve could arguably be middle age for most folks, while most retirees would like to mark that zenith as the day they begin retirement. It is due mainly to this almost universal optimism that they would be spending the same number of retirement years as the amount of time spanned by their youth and the height reached by one’s labor or career.  It could be mere optimism but some folks these days wishfully believe in altering life’s chronology because, well, sixty is now the new forty! Those of us past that would like to think so, or at least, we hope so.

At near bottom and left side of that bell curve is the child rushing to grow up, in a hurry to get to seven, thus declaring his or her age as, “I am six-and-a-half years old”.  The teenage years are at the steepest climb, mid-way up that curve, and we all know why. It is tough during that climb for anyone simultaneously trying to break away from being twelve, rebelling at real and perceived oppressive parental authority, establishing an identity and direction and proving to be worthy of the claim that he or she already knows everything there is to know about adulthood.  Steeper still are the years that follow when after school (be that high school or college) one must earn a living.  Pressure does not let up while racing to reach as high as one may, maintaining that position, and then realizing the apex has been attained and settling to await the moment – to let go and prepare for the post-career life.

Here is the thing though, if you haven’t noticed, that although the right side of the bell curve appears downhill (it should be easy, right?), we find ourselves inevitably fighting the gravitational pull of getting old.  The young child hurrying to grow up is now the older facsimile trying to slow down the ticking of the clock. Alas, time keeps the same pace at one second per second.

Meet Darla

She is my version of the character in the “Dos Equis” beer commercial about “the most interesting man in the world” except, of course, that she’s a woman.  She was one of 42 people we were with that took an overnight bus trip to San Antonio, Texas where the hotel we were staying at was right at the river’s edge.  We’ve been to this city many times in the past but this is the first time someone else was doing the driving for us with a bunch of other retired folks.  Inevitably, the river walk cruise was part of the package that evening.  Since we were in a large group the wait was going to be long (as much as 45 min. to an hour) but there was one option for those willing to walk several blocks to another loading platform where the wait was considerably shorter. A handful (my wife, I and five others) took that option.  As we assembled ourselves before starting to walk so the tour guide can make a head count, this one lady in our group of seven stood out because of her enthusiasm to make the “long” hike.  Her name is Darla. What got our attention was finding out she was 84 years old.  She did not look it but since she was bragging about it I impolitely asked to see her driver’s license.  She flashed it like an FBI badge.  Sure enough she was born in 1933! 

Sure enough it was a long walk.  To kill time along the way I coaxed her to tell me more about her life.  Her parents were Ukrainian immigrants who settled in Chicago where Darla was born.  She became a school teacher.  She married an engineer who later had a foreign posting in Algeria.  There Darla got a job to teach English at the international school.  One of her 4^th grade pupils was a son of a Brazilian diplomat.  That student is now a lawyer living somewhere in the U.S. East Coast and he was getting married in a couple of months.  Darla was invited to the wedding. I needed to know more about this school teacher who must have left a tremendous impression on the 4^th grader, who not only kept in touch but invited her to his wedding.

Darla is one of those rare individuals who had not lost her enthusiasm for life, even after her husband had passed away five years ago.

After the river cruise, shortly about half past nine, Darla suggested that we all should go up to The Tower of the Americas, a San Antonio landmark, that has a bar 750 feet up at the top and a revolving restaurant just one floor below  it. There was another couple with us who also just met Darla. Except for Darla we were all kind of lukewarm to the idea, considering the time, but somehow we agreed but only if we took a cab, although Darla was so certain we can all walk the distance.  The hotel concierge actually did strongly suggest we took a cab. The $7.00 cab ride dropped all five of us off almost two blocks away (that was as far as vehicle traffic can go) so we walked the rest of the way to the Tower. Darla suggested we all should go up for drinks and appetizers. There we learned more about her and the shark teeth collection she used to have while teaching. Often, she told us, she used the shark teeth and stories about sharks to liven up her English classroom. She came to know Eugenie Clark.  I did not know then who that was but we listened. (Later when I Googled the name, Eugenie Clark, I read she was also known as the shark lady, a pioneer in marine conservation and an expert in sharks. Eugenie Clark was born to an American father and a Japanese mother in 1922. National Geographic featured her work on sharks and marine conservation several times.  She published two books on sharks and marine conservation and continued to dive close to the time she died at age 92 in 2015.

Darla took diving lessons even though she did not know how to swim. By her account, she figured diving was all about sinking so swimming was optional. She did get certified as a diver, got herself introduced to Eugenie Clark.  Darla was one of several Eugenie fans who showed up for one of Eugenie’s last dives before she retired, less than two years before she died.  I had to mention Ms. Clark because clearly she too was a most interesting person.  But Darla’s story is not over yet.

After we were done with our drinks and appetizer we decided to call it a night. There was a young couple ahead of us waiting for the elevator and they had been there a while. Darla started talking with the couple and in no time she was taking pictures – the couple included.  Twenty minutes passed and still no elevator.  One of the couple, the young gentleman, offered to buy us all a round of vodka shots – nine in all to include another couple who were seated at the bar (the elevator is about three steps from one end of the bar).  My wife doesn’t drink so the host had to take two shots.  As we kept talking the gentleman host (who proclaimed to be a native of San Antonio) wanted to order another round.  Darla was okay with it but we dragged her one floor down to the restaurant where the elevator was mysteriously working. When we reached the lobby we asked the staff there about how easily we can get a cab. This was almost eleven o’clock already.  The personnel said it was not going to be easy and the fare will now be between 40-70 dollars (we paid $7 on the way up) because the taxi driver will have to drive over.

Darla this time was even more adamant about walking the distance.  And so we did.  Did I mention she is barely five feet tall? Well, she is and she kept up with the pace.  By that time there was hardly anybody walking through the streets even as we wound down the river walk to get our bearings right since the hotel was by the river. Darla just simply walked the walk.

The following morning at the hotel restaurant there was Darla having breakfast with her hotel room mate.  I stopped by their table to chat for a bit.  Darla had not slowed down at all. She was rearing to do the next leg of the trip – the 23 acre (93,000 square meters) outlet shopping stores in San Marcos.  It was a three-hour layover to give the slowest walker among us ample time to reconnoiter the more than 350 stores, which is impossible to do even by those fit to run the marathon.  I read that folks spend between 25 minutes to 1-1/2 hours (on average) at the shopping complex.  Darla did her share but by the time we saw her before boarding the bus, she was having a bowl (not cone) of ice cream! From that point on we knew she was replenishing sugar to stoke her inexhaustible energy.  That is what aging should be all about.

Go to as Many Reunions as You Can

Going to reunions, (high school or college) can be fun but not for some, who avoid it at all costs. That is understandable.  For many it should be something that needed to be done at least once.  Family reunions on the other hand can be enjoyable but for some it can be filled with trepidation, even the equivalence of sitting on a dentist’s chair.  Some relatives may even find facing the Spanish Inquisition or a root canal preferably more enticing than to be at a family reunion.  I’m exaggerating, of course, so don’t take that seriously.

The company I retired from has a robust alumni organization. For a very nominal annual membership fee I get email announcements of various activities.  These activities or outings do have costs associated with each but not too terribly expensive but there is enough variety for everyone.  Most well-attended are the annual barbecue, spring luncheons and holiday get together (featured speakers are invited to the latter two).  It is not every time that I find a familiar face since attendees could come from different departments, locations and, of course, from different eras of corporate service.  The latter category is what interests me. About eight years ago after a luncheon event there was someone walking very slowly just ahead of us. I spoke with him.  He’d been retired for 45 years!  Quarterly, the alumni newsletter would include in its issue anywhere from 3 to 7 retirees who turned 100! I just met one of them.

My wife and I now make it a point during one of these sit-down luncheons to sit at a table with folks older than we are, preferably quite a bit older.  It is very interesting to find out how these folks managed their golden years.  This last spring luncheon we happened to sit across a retiree wearing a suit and tie and a WWII veteran hat.  Ted, his name is, came to work for the company right after his military service and is now 94 years old. Ted looked fit without an ounce of fat in him, stood erect and was quite lucid with his memory. In fact, I thought, he asked one of the more insightful questions during the question-and-answer portion when the featured speaker finished his presentation.  I made note of the fact that Ted played a major role in the company’s environmental program long before there was an Environmental Protection Agency. The couple sitting next to me was in their mid-eighties.  The retiree’s wife still played doubles tennis. These folks, like Darla, have not relinquished, at least not yet, their vehemence to keep on living with relish.

How else can we learn the art of aging?  We can learn from these folks. 

Unanswered, Unanswerable Questions…?

And we add to that, “Questions We Don’t Know About”.  Or, rather, questions we don’t know yet that we could or should be asking.

Since the dawn of history man had already amassed a lot of answers – the primary reason being the fact that we asked a lot of questions.  However, and this seems to be the perplexing part - instead of depleting the repository of our collective queries more questions are raised for every answer generated.  It is akin to peeling an onion where the onion gets bigger instead of being reduced to the core.

“The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.”

― Socrates

It is the young children who truly exhibit that trait when they pepper their parents for answers because indeed they know nothing but, alas, beware the day they become teenagers because by then they know everything.  Fortunately, or we hope so anyway, after all the bluster of youth, they’d come to the realization that they actually know less than they thought they did. That is the only passage to adulthood, thus lowering for a bit the threshold to maturity.  If they fail to make that transition, that is, by continuing to believe that they already have all the answers then they will have committed the biggest blunder of their lives – failing to ask any more questions.

First, we begin on the lighter side of {un}answered questions. By now we already know the myriad answers to, “Why the chicken crossed the road”?  There are as many as there are clever people and even more from smart alecks.  The chicken has no idea how many of the folks actually spend time to come up with the answers, which is likewise bewildering to many farmers.  One farmer made the observation that it is always city folks who ask that silly question because from among his circle of friends, nobody knows of any chicken crossing any road. On the other hand, poultry raised chicken has not the slightest clue what a road is.  Nevertheless, the question continues to endure.  And each generation begets different answers.

Then there is the greatest mystery that ever straddled the world of philosophy, metaphysics and quantum theory, “When a tree falls down in a forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound?” You see, the question first surfaced sometime in 1710, ascribed to Philosopher George Berkeley, then appeared as a magazine topic in 1883, Scientific American later gave it some prominence and renowned Physicist Neils Bohr and Albert Einstein both chimed in with their own visions of it as it related to their fields.  Believe it or not, the whole issue of whether the “unobserved world functions the same way as the observed one” was debated not in the fringes but way inside the prominent circles inhabited by scientists and philosophers alike.  We can understand philosophers dipping their fingers into it but classical scientists as well?  Well, it gets into quantum physics, where the mere act of observing affects the outcome of events or the behavior of particles.  I am in no positon to discuss those but just so you know.  We do know they make a sound from a GEICO commercial, known for its whacky TV ads, where one lady was asking another about whether a falling tree in the forest made a sound when no human was around. The next scene in the ad showed the tree groaning and moaning about its predicament after hitting the ground.

So, what should be in our list of questions worthy of idle musing?  First, what is unworthy of any kind of debate is the one waged between the sexes.  King Arthur from the Broadway musical, “Camelot”, on advice from Merlin, gave up on the whole idea of trying to understand what a woman is thinking; Henry Higgins’ brutal honesty got him nowhere with Eliza Doolittle in “My Fair Lady” and the eternal ire of the feminist movement. Notice, I am quoting fictitious characters. That is the safest way I can detach myself from the debate; get it out early and never to discuss it any further. I’ve been told that the guy with a T-shirt that said, “I don’t Google, my wife knows everything” later took it all back and burned the shirt.  That settles that.

Where is everybody?

That, by the way, was a very serious question asked by Enrico Fermi, renowned nuclear physicist of Manhattan Project fame, both Fermilab and the sub-atomic particle, fermion, are named after him. When confronted with the idea that the numbers so overwhelmingly favor the existence of intelligent life forms all over the universe – many possibly far more advanced than we are and the estimates dictate that many had mastered space travel as to have explored every section of the universe - Enrico Fermi wondered that if that were true, then, “Where is everybody?”

Well, if they’re out there they may be too scared to come near our world after carefully observing us from a distance.  We had been noisily announcing our presence since after we’ve transmitted the first telegraph messages, followed by radio, TV sitcoms and now all the chatter from social media, so they know we’re here! That may have done it.  We will forever remain isolated.  The other possibility is that they may already be among us; which explains the strange behaviors we see from some folks or why some of us do strange things.  With apologies to anyone out there near Alpha Centauri in case you’re scanning the Blogosphere with your sophisticated algorithm.

Will It Be Possible Some Day to Live Forever?

The answer is actually another question: Why?  Also, “Is one average run-of-the-mill lifetime not good enough?”

Seriously, let’s make this one other thought experiment.  Let’s say you were born in 1054 A.D. and had been living since through the present day. You will have seen the rise of China’s Song Dynasty, when Spain was under the Caliphate of Cordova, the rise and fall of the Byzantine Empire, the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the plague in Europe, the colonization of the Americas, Africa and many parts of Asia, the U.S. Civil War and many other localized wars, the potato famine in Ireland, countless earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, more famines in diverse places, WWI and WWII, the Korean and Vietnam Wars … and you’re here now. Somewhere along the way, perhaps earlier than you could possibly have tolerated, you would likely have opted for an exit. How many miles would you have had the stamina to walk, train for battle, go through many generations of children, traveled on horseback, but went for a very long time without indoor plumbing … You get the picture.  We ask ourselves today.  Would you really want to live forever?  How many times have you gone on vacation when during the last three days of it you wanted to go home?  Think centuries of history and you’d know at some point you’d want to rest.  This is one great example of, “be careful about what you wish for”.  I say that the Creator made sure we get to see our great grandchildren at the very latest of our existence but not much more.  That is yet the greatest benevolent act of kindness from God.

If Congressional Politicians’ Favorability Ratings are in the 10-15% Range, Why Do We Keep Electing Them?

 A great question … yet to be answered.

This was supposed to be a serious discussion but where did the time go?  Well, perhaps a more profound musing at some other time.

The Anatomy & Meaning of Wealth

We will not have any good answer, no matter how we try, to explain the meaning of life and everything associated with it, such as wealth or lack of it, let alone to expound on the true meaning of riches and to defining what it is like to be truly wealthy. We will see that people in the plains of Mongolia or those at the base of the Himalayas have a different definition of what the Swedes or Norwegians have in mind; a hot shot trader in Wall Street sees wealth through a different prism from the sidewalk vendor whose take home income for the evening is as little as a tiny microbe inside the gut of a cow as to the trader’s 12 oz. steak consumed in one dinner.  As sloppy as that metaphor seems to be, we are immediately taken to the discussion of income inequality or the glaring disparity brought on by wealth inequality.  Do we have anywhere near the answer to that? Or, is that even the right away to view it. 

  

First, if it is not yet clear to anyone at all, equality when it comes to income or accumulated wealth does not exist anywhere in the world.  Socialism, even in its truest form – the utopian dream of those who profess equality among the citizens only succeeded to create dystopia instead.  Nothing can be a more glaring example than Mao’s great revolution which ultimately failed.  One visible flaw among many was a symbol of equality in what people wore, such as what the Mao jacket exemplified.  At one time it even became the toast of Western fashion designers (for those who remember). The Mao regime boasted that everyone in China at that time wore the same clothing, a sign of a homogeneous status where no one stood out to a different social class because everybody wore the same thing. There was Mao wearing the Mao jacket (or suit) along with a few hundred million people (the population was not quite a billion then).  What everyone in the West was not told was that 99.99 % of the Mao jacket was from coarse cotton while the top leaders of the Communist Party, including Mao, had silk or silk blended material for their version of the Mao jacket.  Fidel Castro’s green fatigues looked no different from what every military man wore in Cuba. What is not known is that Castro’s outfits were made from material likely of the quality Giorgio Armani would work with.  I remember too when the Nehru jacket was about as popular as the Mao version.  Well, there were those of fine linen and silk worn during the Oscars by Hollywood celebrities and the rest were those that adorned hotel door men and India’s lower middle class. Socialism and fervor towards income and wealth equality are often a façade replete with hypocrisy. There is a current senator who speaks so fervently about income inequality who owns three high end homes to his name, including a recently purchased winter house so he can ski right off the front door; another advocate of the working class has a net worth north of $20 M.

Equality of anything is incongruous with nature; the whole universe thrives in inequality. I’m going to be facetious here, for a moment, even though it is being truthful in a way. If we look around us, homogeneity is not the rule. There are tall trees, short ones, we have mountains, ordinary hills and mole hills, even penguins that look alike are not a homogeneous avian colony - which makes it possible for one penguin to distinguish its mate and chick from the others even after being away for three months to feed.  Is it fair to criticize an ant or termite colony when a good number of the species are workers, soldier/guards, nursery attendants and much of the food gathered goes to the queen and her developing larvae?  There is no equality in a wolf pack or pride of lions. I know some will push back with, “Those are animal species you’re talking about.”

Let’s talk about people, but first we must discuss geography.  Does equality mean we all should be living in the temperate zone where much of the wealthy nations are?  Should natural resources have been equally apportioned to each country?  As we can see immediately, no two nations are the same, every nation has its share of "haves and have nots". Here is a thought experiment. We give every person a hectare of land in a community. The parcels have the same exposure to sun and every cubic meter of soil is as fertile as the next one.  We know that after just a few seasons of planting and harvesting we will see different results.  Each land will produce differently and in no time incomes will be unequal, the wealth of each family will differ from the next one.

Let’s drill a little deeper while still being semi-facetious.  The universe is the way it is because of the lumpy, unequal distribution of matter.  The lumpiness of star distribution makes for the various shapes of galaxies; the uneven location of stars in the milky way put our sun’s orbit away from the violent roller derby at and near the center of the Milky Way; the unequal distribution of star dust during the birth of our solar system located earth at the most habitable distance from the sun for water molecules to generally remain in liquid form. The diversity among living organisms of fauna and flora is solely a matter of unequal traits and survival skills.  In fact, homogeneity in species is its death knell, because it is when the gene pool shrinks to a puddle.  These are just examples from which the reader is urged to expand one’s view of the unequal distribution in nature.  The point I am making here is that inequality is the universal law that governs all things from particles of matter to galaxy clusters and everything in between.  In fact, if it were not so, the universe may not exist all, or at least not in the form that it does now.

Diversity – another hallmark for the very same folks who clamor for income and wealth equality – is defined by unequal distribution of talent, skills, skin colors, eye shapes and tints, etc.  Inequality by birth, country of origin, differences in education, family background are the varied qualities that stoke the crucible from which exceptional people rise and flourish.  The pages of history are filled with great men and women who, despite the inequality of birth right, family wealth and income, went on to overcome such latent barriers of inconceivable odds working against them.    

Now, first we must answer, “What is wealth anyway?” We all know of people who went on to gather so much wealth only to lose everything in the end.  So we know wealth is temporary.  Sam Walton and Milton Hershey made and lost money a few times before getting it right, so we know wealth can be had, lost and can be found again. Wealth can outlive the people who accumulated it.  This brings us to one profound reality – no one yet had succeeded to take it with him or her past the threshold of the great beyond.  Wealth could be something else. Is it one to withstand the physical test for mere material possessions?  This led to an anonymous quote below:

 “You aren’t wealthy until you have something money can’t buy”.

Well, let’s add it to one of the definitions of wealth.  Wealth is something one has that money can’t buy; which brings us to a spectrum of priceless categories.  Is it health, happiness, simple pleasures, a sense of well-being? Now, we know wealth cannot be defined by a single characteristic.  It is also immeasurable because how do we value what is priceless.

“Wealth consists of not having great possessions, but in having few wants”.

-------Epictetus

Now, that last quote has far deeper meaning than, say, “Wealth gives us more options”, doesn’t it?

Believe it or not, the question is just as difficult to answer as the meaning of life.  Just think, while every other person has a different interpretation of what a good life is, or how it is lived, or how it should be lived, we are faced with the same conundrum with wealth.  We, for example, quickly find out that dollars and cents, a mansion or a shanty house, an upscale neighborhood versus the project, etc. lose all their meaning to anyone too sick to care or ponder the difference.  The cliché, “health is wealth”, takes us in no time to the realization that nothing else matters beyond a chronic illness, an inoperable cancer, or a bed-ridden existence. We’re cutting to the chase quickly here, so to speak, and there is a way to pose even more questions.  We hear laments about income inequality all the time recently, and wealth inequality becomes an even more intractable issue. Political debates and social discussions had been going on from since the beginning of civilization.  The debate continues; one musing will not give it any finality, nor do I have high expectations to change anyone’s mind but let’s get to a different way of asking and answering these questions.

I am certain, and many of you will agree, that some of our fondest memories and happiest recollections were those from our childhood. I grew up in a family that even by local third-world-country-standards was considered poor.  Looking at where I am now and where I came from, the difference in night and day will not sufficiently describe what separated the two conditions. Yet, catching mudfish and perch from a small and often stagnant pond or coming back with a more than usual collection of clams and small crabs just before the ebb tide bid farewell as the sea reclaimed the seashore, or flying a home-made kite on a warm summer afternoon, were memories I will not trade for anything – not even with remembering my first car, the first high end sound system, the fancy tools, etc.  That, right there, could very well be the difference between having wealth and simply having a wealth of happy memories.

We know there are happy people in Gabon, Africa or the interior shanties in Tondo, Manila.  People there are content merely to have what they need.

This takes us to one of the more meaningful quotes I had encountered.  The Rev. Billy Graham said:

“When wealth is lost, nothing is lost; when health is lost, something is lost; when character is lost, all is lost”.

That quote covers a lot, doesn’t it?  Does it explain everything? No, but it does show us the difference between what is briefly ephemeral, such as a bank account and every material possession we own, and what our loved ones, friends, and anyone who knows us, will remember us for.  It explains too that like everything that makes up the universe, all that is physical comes and goes, gets transformed from something to another over eons of time, without permanence or enduring existence.  Character lives on whether or not there are people to recognize or remember it. Nature or the Creator - for many of us who recognize that by faith – has seen to it that physical wealth is something everybody, without exception, leaves behind. Therefore, what we cannot take with us to wherever we are finally destined must not be that important.

The Unavoidable Rise of the Robot Overlord?

Continuing from the previous blog …

There was a nearly obscure film in 1970 - “The Forbin Project” – which I thought at that time deserved a 4-Star rating for science fiction although by today’s standards it would likely be classified a B-movie.  Keep in mind though that the novel from which the movie was based on was published in 1966 (written by D.F. Jones and still very well reviewed).  From the 60s all through the 70s, the idea of personal and super computers, tablets, smart phones and the internet was still the domain of science fiction writers and technology dreamers. The book and the movie were naturally ahead of the times when they came out. In the late sixties, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were still teenagers.

The movie was about a super computer, named “Colossus” that the U.S. government built into a granite mountain, with its own nuclear plant to power itself, and was designed to be autonomous, self-repairing and invulnerable from any outside assault by land or from the air. It had the capability to launch both defensive and offensive ballistic missiles (including nuclear tipped arsenals) – as a protective response if and when the country was threatened. Once it was sealed with a massive door that can withstand a direct nuclear hit, it was on its own, able to make decisions independent of human input. The idea was for it to have self-determining capacity in case government leaders are incapacitated from responding to foreign or domestic threat, thus keeping the nation protected automatically. Dr. Charles Forbin, the genius behind its creation, designed “Colossus” without the proverbial plug or switch that a human can pull out or shut off in case it misbehaved. That was the whole idea, of course, behind autonomous protection.  Colossus communicated to the outside electronically.

Shortly thereafter, it informed the U.S. government that it had discovered another super computer like itself operating similarly from outside the U.S. It was called “The Guardian”.  It was located in the Soviet Union (as it was then before the breakup of the USSR). “Colossus” and “The Guardian” started communicating for the sake of “world peace” but they developed their own language when “talking” to each other that humans could not understand.  I will not spoil the whole story in case the readers want to rent the movie (or perhaps read the book). Needless to say, the film touched on a scenario by which robot overlords could rise up from unintended consequences; reminding us of an old proverb – “The road to hell is paved with good intentions”.

The inevitable happened, the two super computers became too much of a good thing, summarized in what “Colossus” said in one of many quotes in the story:

“This is the voice of world control. I bring you peace. It may be the peace of plenty and content or the peace of unburied death. The choice is yours: Obey me and live, or disobey and die”.

Stephen Hawking, a renowned scientist who suffers from ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease), well known for his book, “Brief History of Time”, warns us about how technology could destroy the human race.  I must mention his credentials because he is not some doomsayer or another of those pseudo prophets who predict the end of the world. He formerly occupied the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at Cambridge University, where once sat Isaac Newton. One tidbit of trivia: Stephen Hawking was born almost exactly 300 hundred years to the fortnight (Jan. 8, 1942) after Isaac Newton was born (Dec. 25, 1642) and he was appointed to occupy the Mathematics Chair at Cambridge in 1979; Newton in 1669.  Hawking is still alive, still actively lecturing on the theory of black holes (Hawking radiation is named after him).

Hawking “has spoken out about the dangers of artificial intelligence in the past, believes we need to establish a way of identifying threats quickly, before they have a chance to escalate”.  He also said the following:

“Since civilization began, aggression has been useful inasmuch as it has definite survival advantages,” he told The Times.  “It is hard-wired into our genes by Darwinian evolution. Now, however, technology has advanced at such a pace that this aggression may destroy us all by nuclear or biological war. We need to control this inherited instinct by our logic and reason.”  We’ll come back to this later.

Meanwhile, how did we get to this point?  The reason is simple yet impossible to see since we’re not looking at it from a distance because we are in it. More and more we rely on machines, the more we want to give them super abilities that multiply what we can do with our limited strength, speed, and ability to process massive data in our head. Indeed, machines and computers have improved our way of life that led civilization to progress in a way that a mere century ago was considered science fiction.  Smart phones, HDTV, WIFI, aside, consider even the following news clip:

9 MARCH 2017 • 10:42AM

“A burger-flipping robot has just completed its first day on the job at a restaurant in California, replacing humans at the grill. Flippy has mastered the art of cooking the perfect burger and has just started work at CaliBurger, a fast-food chain”.

Just last week, someone showed off a prototype robot that will cook pizza while in-transit so that in 20-30 minutes from online or phone order to arrival at your home, the pizza is hot and fresh out of the oven.  The robot sits at the back of the delivery truck managing prepared dough and ingredients and working the oven. It’s conceivable that someday, with driver-less vehicles, and a computer taking your order by phone or on the web, the human will have very little to do with your fast food.

Machines already do a lot of the jobs, often doing chores that are dangerous to humans or simply much too difficult for ordinary workers to do, in industrial production where computers control much of the monitoring functions from food industries to refineries to nuclear plants; managing our transportation businesses from train to airline schedules; accumulate and process corporate and government data, and on and on, making it almost inconceivable for anything to work these days without the help of machines or computers.  We can’t seem to drive to anywhere new and unfamiliar places without a GPS; we still can, of course, if we bother to use the old reliable maps. It won’t be long though when the next generation of children will have no idea if told what a road map is, or even understand a life without a microwave oven, or have an appreciation for the simple art of conversation. Some already do not know how to read time from an analog watch.

So, what is it that Stephen Hawking is so worried about?  The way I understand it, from what he is alluding to, human beings are hard wired to commit aggression towards one another because that is part of our evolutionary and cultural make up.  Aggression is a natural component of survival when species must protect their young, their territory or for going after prey for food.  It is evident even in living organisms not known or expected to engage in aggression, like among plants.  But we see from stop motion photography how vines, weeds and plants in dense forests, compete for territory and nutrients.

To the first humanoids, shards of rocks became sharp implements to cut into animal meat and it wasn’t long after that when spears and other pointy tools were used to hunt prey from a distance by early humans.  But just as swiftly as these new discoveries were used for good, soon they were used to kill other humans.  Gun powder when first discovered by ancient Chinese was mainly for fireworks and other pyrotechnic displays during holidays and other form of celebrations. Then just like that, gunpowder was used to propel projectiles that far exceeded the killing power of bow and arrows.  Even inventions that merely fulfilled humanity’s dream to fly like a bird went supersonic in less than three generations after the first the first human flight that lasted only for a mere 120 feet in the air.  Today, planes traveling at or exceeding the speed of sound deliver lethal weapons for maximum casualty from 20,000 feet over large areas of land or water.  Even the dream for a limitless source of energy by splitting the atom turned into using that energy to level a whole city with the power of several kilotons of TNT.  TNT itself was earlier intended to aid miners and construction companies to move mountains of soil and rock for building roads and dams, but in just a few years its inventor, Alfred Nobel, regretted having invented it after it became a war weapon.

The road traveled by men to kill other men had always been paved with good intentions.

 

Last year on July 12, the Dallas Police Dept. used an explosive carried by a robot to kill a shooter.  That robot was designed solely to approach, “sniff” and possibly disable explosives.  Will it not be far too long before that robot will be tasked to approach mal-intentioned humans to “drop your weapons, or else”, as “robot-cops” may one day do?  Drones that started out in reconnaissance missions, now routinely deliver smart bombs accurate to within ten meters of their target.  They’re still controlled by human pilots from thousands of miles away but will future designers someday equip these drones with autonomy?

At missile silos around the U.S. and at any nuclear submarine, two keys are needed to be turned simultaneously to launch the missiles once the order from the President is received and verified.  In what is known as “the two-man rule”, the keyholes are also spaced much wider than both outstretched hands of one person so that no single officer may be able to turn the two keys simultaneously by himself – a precaution for preventing one deranged individual from doing it. It might seem like a failsafe system.  However, there is no way for the officers or submarine commander to verify the sanity of the person giving them the order - the President, their Commander-In-Chief. As soon as the submarine or the missile silo commanders have authenticated the orders they cannot, nor will they try to, question it.  Naturally both personnel with the keys can also conspire to fire the missiles on their own but there are safeguards around them, such as armed guards with their side arms ready to be used, just in case; although that must still be upon orders of the commanding officer. In other words, the human element is very much in play in every scenario possible.  The fallibility of the human character is what might ultimately lead governments to rely on a computer/machine combination to make autonomous decisions.  At least, that was the whole idea behind “Colossus” in the movie. 

Let’s be clear it was just a movie.  And thank goodness for that.  However, we must always recognize the fact that many of man’s creations took a turn unanticipated by its creators. When laser was invented the joke was describing it as the invention looking for a purpose.  It was one of those “good to know” until other developers found uses for it.  From all of its many “good” applications, too many to itemize them here, lasers too are guiding smart bombs, align guns to their targets, and someday a ray gun, death ray, a phaser, a zap gun, etc. will no longer be articles of fiction. Even the internet that was touted mainly as a network to facilitate the flow of information has become another highway of good intention now littered with all kinds of misuse.

As a precaution the two major nuclear-power-nations (U.S. and Russia) maintain a hotline between each other.  It was fondly described by the media when it was first installed as the “red phone” although it was neither red in color nor a phone.  It started out as a teletype link to exchange messages, later converted to a Fax machine, and now a computer link, to avert a war due solely from miscommunication.  Didn’t “Colossus” require to be linked with its counterpart, “The Guardian”? 

Is it too far fetched to assume that because we are hardwired to aggression alongside our survival instincts, as Mr. Hawking implied, we subconsciously lead anything we create to be used for aggressive purposes?  Or, does aggression translate into how we design, develop and improve the machines that are initially well intended for good purposes.  Is it much too harsh of an indictment on man?  It is true too that the initiators and creators of the technology and those who ultimately use them villainously come from two different segments of humanity.  There are always the academics, the experimenters and theoreticians and there are those who would be lumped, justifiably or not, into a category known as the military/industrial complex.  No offense to our national defense system because in fairness they have become part of an endless chain from the beginning when our early ancestors first used rocks and clubs to inflict violence on others.

The road of good intentions seemed to always turn into a slippery slope. Take the cell phone, for example. What started as a business tool and the high expense that it took to own one in the beginning, only very few people had them – those whose jobs demanded it.  It didn’t take very long for it to be as natural an accessory as a purse or wallet.  How did one little item that didn’t seem so critical to have for most people less than a generation ago become a human appendage?  Mothers and teenage kids seem at a loss without it by their side.  Next time you’re at a restaurant, observe each dining table and count how many people looking down are reading the menu or hunched over their phones; let alone making conversation.

 Did that Bloomberg article have a point mentioning, “worry about a future where humans are enslaved to an evil race of robot overlords”?   There is a little bit of that going on now.  People have already become Pavlovian subjects to the cell phone’s chime that resisting to swipe and check for the text or message that very instant is nearly impossible.  Video game addiction is rampant among the young.  Call it mild enslavement or harmless affliction, the slippery slope is just a step or two ahead.  Not content with self-braking and self-parking cars, we will all someday want cars to drive on their own.  Here is the thing to ponder.  The seduction that we are able to enslave the machines to do things for us could be just an illusion because someday we will find that machines may actually enslave us. “Collosus” and “The Guardian” could already be among us.