The McCornick boys

     One hundred and twenty years ago, in 1906, my grandfather, Thomas McCornick, left his hometown of Kirkcollen in what is now Dumfries and Galloway Council, Scotland, boarded the SS Laurentian in Glasgow and emigrated to America.  There he met and married Mabel Johnston of Nova Scotia and had three sons: Thomas Jr., John (called "Stanley"), my father, and William.  Each of the boys had two children, first a boy - all boys were born in the same month as their father - then a girl.

I was the first-born of the six McCornick kids; then came Brian, son of Thomas and Elizabeth (Hughes); then William, who went through life simply as "Billy." The girls, my sister, Karen, Brian's sister, Diane, and Billy's sister, Peggy, came in-between.  Because of the enclosed photo, I am focusing only on the boys for now.

At one point in our lives, my mother wrote me a letter telling me "how proud she was that all the McCornick boys were serving their country." I wrote a nasty letter back, which I would withdraw from history if I could go back in time.  I was fiercely opposed to the Vietnam War raging at the time and had no use for America's armed forces and told my mother if she mentioned that fact again I'd never again open a letter from her.  My poor mother had many reasons to doubt my choices in life; that was one of them.  Brian made a career in the Air Force and Billy was a Marine. I went to Berlin first as a Russian "linguist" - as the army calls people who have anything to do with languages - but switched to German, once they found out I was of greater use to them as a "German linguist."

As kids, we got together almost daily during the summers because we lived by a lake and the swimming was good.  Billy and Brian and Diane and Peggy were more like my sibling, Karen, than cousins. We were each other's best friends and constant companions.

I went away to college; Thomas' family moved to Florida and Bill's family got into family quarrels over property in Nova Scotia, and the closeness we once had shattered.  We never put ourselves back together. Of the six McCornick kids, three remain alive: Billy and my sister Karen and me.  

Two nights ago, Brian's daughter phoned my sister to say that he had died in the hospital.  I had intended to give him a call, but as I dithered over what to say across the sixty-year silence gap, time got out ahead of me; I never phoned and now add that to my list of old-fogey regrets.

Fortunately, I remembered that I had a photo of the three of us McCornick boys stashed away somewhere.  It took hours, but I managed to locate it.

Here it is: Alan standing behind the barrow, Brian in the middle, Billy in the front.

Proof that we were indeed young once.

Who's in charge here?

I just read an article by Ezra Klein in this week's Sunday NY Times on Artifical Intelligence which makes me feel as if my friend Bill and I have been busy shifting the chairs on the Titanic.

He and I have been fussing over the way we've been duped into thinking we're reading true stories on the internet, only to discover at some point that they are AI generated.  The solution to our complaint, obviously, is to seek legislation requiring YouTube (and other publishers) to state explicitly and openly whenever what they publish is AI generated. Easier said than done, of course, but that's a fight for another day.

This Ezra Klein Times article (Sunday, September 20) points out that a far more dangerous concern is what is known as RSI - "recursive self-improvement."  That is, the ability of artificial intelligence to ignore human input entirely by getting around its limitations - by combining efforts with other AI generators, for example - and generating ever new and improved ways of producing information.

There is no way of preventing a mechanical (non-human) producer of "truth" from producing things that could lead to the taking of human life as a useful shortcut to efficiency or productivity, for example, unless we have some sort of human guardrails, some form of ethical constraint.  If left to its own devices, AI programs have no "reason" to select a moral constraint - or any other constraint.  As non-humans, they have no morality. Just as corporations lacking CEOs with a conscience have no goals other than profit, AI programs, which lack a sense of ethics, have no goal other than a solution to any given problem it is working on. Damn the torpedoes.

A sense of morality can, of course, be programmed in.  But the way the world is currently set up, with nations in competition with each other, no one nation is going to place such constraints on AI for fear that it will allow other nations to soar ahead in their own particular AI development.  And this is true not just for competitions between nations, but for competitions within any given nation as well.

The way that nuclear proliferation got out of control should be a warning that this threat is not merely theoretical.  It's real.  And of a much greater degree of magnitude.

Makes me glad I won't have to live in a world where this could happen.

Unless my doctor's warning that instead of dying within the next couple years from pulmonary fibrosis I could live to 90 and be hit by a bus is unduly pessimistic and I will live to 100.

Hostage Justice

I spend a lot of time these days reliving the past and among other things I have been singing the praises of Japan, a country I came to call home after twenty-four years of residence there. After some initial awkwardness, I quickly came to appreciate its many obvious virtues, starting with a people who are fundamentally other-oriented, nature-loving, and who share my view that life ought to be lived in avoidance of violence and deceit.  Japan has been very good to me; it provided me with an occupation which enabled me to buy a home in the San Francisco Bay Area, and a husband I love dearly. I am at home with its hot springs, its cuisine, its civility and its mostly modest ways.

On the downside, what I find fault with are largely trivial things.  I often cite the line, "How can Japan know so much about what it beautiful and so little about what is ugly?" which addresses the garishness and tackiness of its cities. But there is one thing about Japan which startled me the first time I heard of it as incongruent with its order, civility and safe streets, and that is the fact that over 99% of police indictments lead to conviction. Defenders of the system will say that is because the police are careful to build an open-and-shut case before they indict; I'm with those who worry it speaks to the extent the police will go to get lawbreakers to confess to their crimes.

Japan has what is called a "hostage justice" system where suspects are held in prolonged physical detention and denied bail to pressure or coerce them into confessing to crimes.  Human Rights Watch attributes the high conviction rate to the fact that Japan prioritizes confessions over due process.  There is an upside to this: if one shows proper contrition, the sentencing may be light because, one assumes, there is a consciousness of a national community in which expulsion or some other kind of excommunication is viewed as unduly harsh. But woe betide those who maintain their innocence.

Listen to a couple testimonies of victims of this Japanese "guilty until proven innocent" approach.

Which brings me to the reason I've brought this topic up in the first place.  A former colleague of mine mentioned on a Facebook page that she had just made a visit to Chiba Prison to visit Chris Payne, an American fighting a wrongful conviction. The Tokyo High Court reversed his guilty conviction when they found that DNA evidence used to convict him had been falsified. Yet, astonishingly, he has remained in solitary confinement for the last four years and nine months. He was moved from Tokyo to Chiba recently for retrial purposes, but apparently due to the court’s scheduling congestion the retrial date is not set to begin until next April, a full eight months from now. In solitary confinement! The injustice is glaring. The conviction was based on a falsified DNA analysis. And while the analyst goes scot free, Chris sits in solitary. Something here stinks to heaven. 

Where are the good guys here? Where is the American Embassy? Chris is from Indiana. Where are his Senators and Congressmen? The U.S. press covered the story initially, but where has it been since?

(I urge you to follow the links here, here and here and get the background to the whole story.) 

My colleague managed to meet with Chris and was distressed to hear of his untreated health conditions and disturbed by the fear she heard in his voice. 

I have no direct personal knowledge of Chris Payne's case, but I do trust what my colleague has posted on her Facebook page and the reports from the press seem credible. There is so much injustice floating about these days that this may not strike you as worth more than passing interest, but I find the case so egregious that I simply had to take the time to call it to your attention.

Help me make this injustice go away.