Reposting: "Human Beings Were Not Meant to Travel This Way"
Hmm, AI think this sounds familiar. Also: The Titan and the Trawler
Saturday, January 6. Good morning. One more “rerun” before we get back to the events of 1893.
This piece is about the periodic moral panics humans get into when they have developed technology beyond their ability to understand it, or even manage it. I hope you enjoy it, either again or for the first time!
—Jen
Saturday June 24, 2023. Good morning.
"The investigation of the different causes that tend to influence the health of the community, either injuriously or otherwise, is one of great public import, particularly in a high-pressure age like the present - an age in which it is too much the custom to sacrifice all considerations of health and safety to a determined and eager desire to do in a few hours what our ancestors were content to do in as many days."
I asked my son Evan the other day what topic he thought this quote was referring to, and he said, reasonably enough, AI.
This is, in fact, a paragraph from an article written by H.W. Porter, an actuary who had been concerned about the hazards to human health - and about the insurance costs that might be incurred - as people increasingly traveled by train. The article, entitled "On the Influence of Railway Travelling on Public Health” was published in 1860. Porter chose not to examine the injuries or deaths caused by actual train accidents, which, he said, would be “ probably very small in comparison with the fatalities arising from diseases engendered and fostered by rapid and persistent railway locomotion…"
Back in the 19th century, the huge technological leap of travel by train was made well before there was enough government to study or regulate such a transformation in the way goods and people were conveyed. However, there were insurance companies, who were always on the lookout for hazards.
How many of you know that, for example, the decision to protect homes from fire was made by insurance companies rather than cities or towns? (The fire insurance industry got its boost after the Great Fire of London in 1666.) Insurance companies only protected the homes of the insured, however.
You can thank Benjamin Franklin (who else?) for the concept of the volunteer fire department, which would attend to a fire regardless of whether the homeowner was insured. He founded the Union Fire Company in Philly in 1736.
So, back to train travel.
No one had ever traveled so fast, so far, and in the company of so many other people. As with space travel in the 1960s, no one knew how traveling at such speeds would affect the human body. Human bodies could melt, or at the least, women’s uteruses might be ejected from their bodies. As this wonderful article in Atlas Obscura details, instances of “railroad madness” were reported all the way up through the 1890s.
Indeed, H.W. Porter the actuary cited some health effects of train travel reported by medical doctors in the British medical journal The Lancet:
• "Persons of a nervous temperament seem to be peculiarly obnoxious to this mode of transit. They are likely to suffer from paralytic seizures.”
• "The mischievous effects of allowing the eyes to rest upon external objects near at hand - such as telegraph poles and wires, near trees, hedges, &c. - is strongly dwelt upon.
• "In cases of diseases of the heart, it would seem that the hurry and anxiety attendant on "catching the train," is highly objectionable. Too great caution cannot be exercised in this respect by persons suffering from such maladies."
Alas, I can locate neither the origin nor the evidence of the concern for women’s uteruses.
A famous poster from the 1830s warned Philadelphians about some of the more, ahem, pedestrian dangers that would ensue if they allowed yet another train line into the city.
Poster circulated in Philadelphia in 1839 to discourage the coming of the railroad [courtesy National Archives And Records Administration]
Putting aside the warning that Philadelphia could become a suburb of New York, there was another, even more visceral fear hinted at here. Remember that train travel was so new that railroads hadn’t even reached Philadelphia until six years earlier - 1833.
The 1839 poster clued into an issue that would take decades to resolve. The dangers of running railroad tracks through a city was nowhere more apparent than in Chicago, which was literally the crossroads for raw materials coming in from the West and South and heading East, and for goods coming in from the East and elsewhere. As early as the 1850s, so many train lines were criss-crossing Chicago that lines were already fighting with one another over control of parts of the city. So many people were being killed at grade crossings that newspapers, outraged, often referred to the deaths as murder or slaughter. (Chronicle, January 7, 1896.) Every once in awhile, a half-hearted effort would be made to regulate the rails, but the press and politicians of Chicago were not going to look this gift (iron) horse in the mouth.
It took decades for peoples’ fantasy fears about what could happen to train travelers to be supplanted by an understanding of the actual dangers. It will take much less time for us to get a handle on what actual dangers A.I. pose.
Train travel continues to be hazardous of course - just a few weeks ago a horrific train derailment accident in India killed 275 people and injured over a thousand more. In the states, a number of derailments have made the news, including a train that spilled toxins into the earth and water in East Palestine, Ohio, which took days to make the national news.
What interests me here (for the purposes of this Substack anyway) is not whether or not toxin-filled trains are crashing regularly. It’s more the role that the press has played over time in deciding what to convey to us about what’s dangerous about any emerging technology. It’s an interesting parallel to what the press is currently writing about what’s dangerous about AI. (In fact the NYT is on this beat now. On Wednesday it published a questionnaire to see if readers could tell the difference between quotes about “AI or Nuclear Power?”
AI OR NOT AI?
I will admit to being more curious than terrified about the development of Artificial Intelligence, especially in the form of the large-language models such as ChatGPT and Bard. I absolutely wish we had a sort of F.D.A. for tech, where such technologies could be tested out before being unleashed upon the people. As a former Google employee put it, it is as if a drug company was allowed to put a drug on the market without any testing for safety.
But we don’t. And honestly, it’s fun to play with. FYI I have used ChatGPT to test out titles for some of these columns. While I have never used any of their suggested titles in their entirety, the suggestions have prompted ideas.
Instead of compounding errors by listing some of the most common worries about AI - you can read some in the notes below - let’s note that every single major technology has been met with fear and worry, some based on fact, some not. Wired wrote a great article about which technologies seem to engender these fears, these days labeled “moral panics,” in 2013. Among the fears was that the advent of the telephone would do away with the need to gather in person. I’ll note also that this article was written a few years before the rosy dreams of how social media would bring the world together came crashing down around our ears.
Why are we so quick to credit any prognostication, given how often they are wrong? (cf Presidential Election of 2016). Shouldn’t we get to know AI a little better before we decide it’s likely to be the end of humanity? It’s easier to fear what you don’t understand. While the press is eager to publish reports from those who should know that there’s a 50% chance of that happening, they seem more reluctant to share the views of those who feel that AI could save humanity. Right now, for example, ChatGPT is helping teachers save time on the tedium of creating lesson plans, and creating other such short cuts for people in other professions. With the lightning quick speed that technology moves these days, apps have already been developed to detect and thus curtail the use of ChatGPT in, say, student essays.
If I’m wrong, well, I guess I won’t be around for you to say, “I told you so.” Neither will you.
FURTHERMORE (Titan and the Trawler)
I was finishing up this column when it was reported that parts of the submersible "Titan" were found on the seafloor near its destination, the wreck of the Titanic. The vessel evidently had a catastrophic implosion shortly after it lost communication with the surface ship. It seems that the deaths of the passengers were likely mercifully short compared to the fate that so many of us were dreading for them all week.
It's hard to imagine that you could devise a tragedy that more potently evokes the excess and folly of this second Gilded Age than the hubris and carelessness of one billionaire building a cutting-edge sea-going vessel on the cheap and charging his fellow billionaires massive amounts of money to dive it onto the wreck of yet another Gilded Age folly. The owner and skipper reportedly wrote in an email, “We have heard the baseless cries of 'you are going to kill someone' way too often. I take this as a serious personal insult." (BBC)
That the passengers of the Titan evidently met their demise meters away from the bow of the Titanic would not be credible in a work of fiction. Sadly, it’s all-too believable that the resources and bandwidth that were expended in a days-long rescue mission of these explorers who had known the risks they took - and signed insurance waivers acknowledging same - vastly outmatched the aid that was extended last week to a fishing trawler (unnamed, at least in news reports) that sank off the coast of Greece, drowning hundreds of Pakistani migrants who had paid their smugglers sums that for many were astronomical. I doubt very much that these travelers had insurance to waive.
I am not saying that efforts should have been spared to try to rescue the passengers of the Titan. I am asking whether a little more effort might have been spared to save the hundreds of others who died at sea last week. When you look at where the resources and attention were paid, you have to wonder if human lives have been literally deemed equal to their net worth. The Titan’s surviving family members will likely be well-compensated, even with the signed insurance waivers. The survivors of the Greek tragedy likely have seen hope slip further away.
As you may have noticed, Chicago does not figure largely this week. But the themes that drew me to 19th-century Chicago - the proving ground for the first Gilded Age - are all here. Sadly.
NOTES OR FURTHER READING
THE TITAN
Titan’s experimental design drew concern even before its doomed dive-Washington Post
MIGRANT BOAT TRAGEDY
Greek Migrant Boat Wreck May be Mediterranean’s Worst-Ever Tragedy - CNN
A Superyacht Gave a Lifeline to 100 Migrants Thrown Into the Sea - The New York Times
THE MORAL PANIC AROUND EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES
A.I. or Nuclear Weapons: Can You Tell These Quotes Apart? - The New York Times
Why Is The World Afraid Of AI? The Fears Are Unfounded, And Here's Why. - Josh Berstein
Top Ten Things to Fear about Advanced Artificial Intelligence - Analytics Insight
Ever-Present Threats from Information Technology - Frontiers
When People Feared Computers - The Atlantic
Why We Freak Out About Some Technologies but Not Others | WIRED
Women And Children First: Technology And Moral Panic - WSJ
“Exaggerated Hopes and Baseless Fears” by social scientist Alan Ryan in Social Research Magazine for the Fall 1997
THE MORAL PANIC - and ACTUAL HAZARDS - AROUND TRAIN TRAVEL
Early Trains Were Thought to Make Women’s Uteruses Fly Out | Mental Floss
The Victorian Belief That a Train Ride Could Cause Instant Insanity - Atlas Obscura
Chicago’s Deadly Streets in the Late 19th and early 20th Century - Patrick Reardon
THE ORIGINS OF INSURANCE AND FIRE DEPARTMENTS
How Insurance Began - WSR Insurance
How the Great Fire of London Created Insurance - the Museum of London