Monthly Archives: November 2016

Inventing a New Color

30 Wednesday Nov 2016

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Inventing A New Color — A Chapter from Tales from an American Childhood

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After my dad returned from World War II, he married my mom and nine months later, I was born. We lived in a number of places, but when I was about three and a half, we moved to Portugal. My dad headed up a tire factory there. I don’t remember much about Portugal, but I do recall going with him to some of his fancy dinners. For reasons I did not understand at the time, when I was five, my mother and I took the long ocean liner ride back to America without my dad. Mom and I lived with grandpa and grandma at their house. I attended a kindergarten in Firestone Park and had a very nice teacher. I loved kindergarten.

I missed my dad but liked grandpa and grandma. She told me “Old Pete” stories and we listened to radio shows such as Roy Rogers, Hop-along Cassidy, and Tom Corbett and the Space Cadets. “Little Grandma” lived there too. She was my grandpa’s mom and stooped over very tiny, very old, and looked like a Native American. Much later, I learned that that was because she was Native American or perhaps half Native American. I loved “Little Grandma.”

Grandpa worked as an engineer and designed airplane wings, among other things. Grandpa was also a painter and his beautiful and detailed oils hung in large wooden frames throughout his house. Mostly, these were landscapes but there were also portraits and my personal favorite depicted two warships firing cannons at each other while being tossed on giant waves. Grandpa taught me many things. Naturally, I wanted to return the favor. When I was about five, I overheard him saying that it was impossible to invent a new color. Well, I could definitely teach him something about that! I loved the idea of being an inventor.

In the middle of kindergarten, my dad returned from Portugal and re-united with my mom. He bought a house and we moved away to a different neighborhood. I had to start school in a new kindergarten with all strange kids. The very first day, my new teacher decided that I would lead the parade and draped the rope of a large drum around my neck. I didn’t want to play the drum and I made that about as clear as I could to her, but nonetheless, I ended up marching around the room with the heavy drum around my neck. I hated kindergarten.

My dad worked as an engineer and my mom was a teacher so both of them were gone all day. They hired a housekeeper to take care of me. And, somehow, after the first day, I convinced my housekeeper that I did not need to go to kindergarten any more. This was fine with me because she was nice enough to give me my favorite lunch every day — a jar or maraschino cherries!  They were so sweet and such a pretty red. And, not only were the cherries themselves delicious. The jars proved to be perfect for my experiments! So, in the second half of kindergarten, I stayed home and instead spent my time inventing a new color to show grandpa. I had a paint set and I water and I had lots of empty cherry jars. It was all a matter of time and careful work. At last, I would be able to teach grandpa something. I love teaching.

After many weeks of careful work, I finally created a new color. When grandpa and grandma came to visit, I was ready. Under my bed were about 40 little jars of diluted paint. Thirty-nine of them were failed attempts. But one of them contained the prize. I carefully crawled under the bed and located my invention, pulled it out, and scampered into the living room where the adults practiced their buzz-talk. Buzz-talk sounded serious and low but didn’t actually mean anything so far as I could tell. Surely, no-one could mind if I interrupted buzz-talk by announcing my invention. I proudly held out my prize to grandpa. Grandpa was very smart, so the fact that he did not immediately catch the significance of this jar surprised me. He merely glanced at the watery liquid in the maraschino cherry jar without comment. I’d better clue him in. “Grandpa! It’s a new color!” He glanced at it again and said, “I’ve seen it before.” And just like that, he went back to buzz-talk!  Crest-fallen, I wandered back to my bedroom and placed the prize beneath my bed with all the failed experiments. Apparently, this was just another one. Despite this terrible turn of events, I hardly gave up. I just redoubled my efforts. I knew there was a new color out there somewhere and I would find the perfect mix and next time be successful! I loved the challenge.

Grandpa had already taught me that red and yellow paint made orange; that yellow and blue paint made green; and that red and blue paint made purple. So, obviously, most of my experiments involved various proportions of red and green, purple and yellow or orange and blue. Most of them ended up as fairly similar shades of gray-brown. But if I mixed very carefully, I produced not dull gray-brown but something with a slight tinge of something…new! I somehow found other jars because I needed more than just the supply offered by one a day lunch-time maraschino cherry jars. I didn’t think bigger jars would have anything to do with inventing a new color, but it was possible. After a few weeks, grandpa and grandma came over to visit again. And again, I interrupted their dull living room buzz talk by showing off my latest creation. This time, I was more apprehensive. The first time, after all, I had known for sure I had a new color. This time, I was uncertain. I waited for the right opportunity — that slight pause in the buzz-talk — to display my new creation.

“I’ve seen that,” Grandpa said and turned back to buzz-talk. I wasn’t yet old enough to argue. And, even now, years later, if someone claims they have seen a color and you think they have not seen the color, I am still not sure how to argue. Convincing other people is seldom an easy task and convincing them that their own perception is limited — that is extremely difficult. Many times, I have heard the old saw, “In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.” I actually doubt that. I suspect in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is more likely to be declared in league with Satan and ends up being stoned to death.

Let’s think about this. Suppose you are the one-eyed person in the land of the blind. Say everyone is hungry and you see a berry bush a couple hundred yards away. Now what? Well, you could say, “Hey, everyone! I see a berry bush over there (uselessly pointing). Let’s go pick some berries.” Everyone else says, “What berry bush? I don’t feel one. I don’t hear one. I don’t smell one. There’s no berry bush. Be quiet and stop talking non-sense.” Alternatively, you could just quietly walk over to the berry bush and bring back a small quantity for everyone to share. Of course, if everyone went, you could bring back a lot more, but no-one wants to follow you. You bring back some berries but people would be suspicious. They might well think you had been hiding these and had many more you failed to share.

Similarly, if you saw a pack of hyenas headed your way and warned people, the blind might well think you were in league with the hyenas. After all, you were the first one to know about them. You must have told the hyenas where everyone was. At long last, if you were the one-eyed person, you might be pretty tempted to put out that other eye. Life would run a lot smoother for you. Alternatively, you could leave the tribe and live on your own. And, many people do make this choice, essentially. But it’s a pretty lonely life. You could try to patiently explain that just as sometimes they could smell things they could not feel and feel things they could not smell, and hear things they could not yet feel or smell, that you could “see”…ah, that’s the sticky bit.  How do you explain sight to the unsighted?

Of course, my grandfather was not blind. Far from it. He was not only an adult, with more power and experience and knowledge than a five year old kid. He was, in fact, an artist. He was an expert on color. I could see evidence of his expertise everywhere. His paintings adorned our house and his own. So, he probably was right about the particular colors I had shown him so far.  But that didn’t mean that I couldn’t invent one next time that was truly new. So, back to the lab, I went. I failed a few more times and eventually gave up. Inventing a new color really was impossible.

Or was it?

Many years later, I attended an art exhibit in Pittsburg. It featured many kinds of “modern art” including a very cool kinesthetic art exhibit. In one exhibit, I simply stood on a platform in front of a large rotating disk. I watched the disk rotate until quite unexpectedly, the disk was quite still and I was rotating the other direction! But of particular interest were some extremely large extremely brightly colored canvasses which featured huge swaths of complementary colors. If I stared for a good long time at the super bright red and then moved my eyes over to the super bright green, the combination of temporal and spatial contrast produced an unearthly bright green, a “supersaturated” color impossible to produce by merely using one pigment. While I had not invented this, at least I now had experienced a color it was likely my grandpa never had. I could not really check this out though because he was long dead. Of course, I have met him in dreams many times and in the dreams he’s not really dead. It was all a big mistake. And, in my dreams, there are often landscapes painted in supersaturated colors that even he has to admit are new inventions. I love it when even the wisdom of elders may be mistaken and changes over time.

My grandpa knew that we humans are all mortal but he also knew that we still had some fragmentary art that was thousands of years old. Perhaps art provides a kind of immortality. When I was about ten, grandpa visited Europe and saw many of the oil paintings of the “Old Masters” that he had admired so much. He saw with his own eyes that, over time, the oil that they used turned yellow and the colors that they had used were transformed. Father Time himself invented new colors for these artists. When, he returned from Europe, he switched from oil painting to water colors. Beyond that, he limited himself to using only three pigments all of which were oxides of metals. He was also very careful in his choice of canvas for the same reason. He stuck to these constraints so that his paintings, unlike those of the “Old Masters” would not yellow or fade with time.

Grandpa’s paintings were designed by an artist/engineer to be stable and unchanging over time. When Grandpa died, I inherited quite a few of my favorite water colors and I can testify that the colors were extremely stable over time. They remained stable, that is, up until the time we moved to California and almost everything we owned was burned up in a moving van fire. What was burned up included all our furniture, electronics, papers, and almost all clothing and paintings. All the carefully laid pigments of metals were altered forever. All of the work and effort were now white ash floating somewhere in the sky near Continental Divide Arizona. A little carelessness on the part of a trucker in too much of a hurry, perhaps, to check the lubrication and the whole truck went up in flames. Robert Burns comes to mind.

It seems to me that our country once comprised a long-standing collaborative work of art involving many artists and many colors. This was a painting of scale and magnificence, though not yet completed. Every shade of the rainbow and more besides swept from sea to shining sea. The painting combined portraiture and landscape, scenes of war and peace, city, country, rivers, lakes, deep woods, and shining plains. Yet, somehow, people became impatient with the progress of the painting. Maybe, they thought, the work would go faster if we just painted the whole canvas white. They no longer cared what the end result looked like. They just wanted to get done so we could move on to the next project. We really couldn’t take the time to make sure the bearings were lubricated. And, now, the transport burned up along with the painting. What’s left are scattered white flakes snowing down on the countryside. I love irony, but I loved the paintings more.

At some point, grandpa said something else to me about color. He said that most people look at color in the light but that there is also color in the shadow. And, so, despite the deepening, darkening shadows, I am trying to see the color hidden there in those shadows. It is too soon to know whether I am inventing a new color, inventing a new way to look at color, or just seeing what is actually an after-image, beautiful for now, but sure to soon fade to the dull white gray of old and sooted snow. Maybe one of us can invent a new color or a new way of painting or a new way of looking or a new way of helping people be less impatient with the slow careful progress required for a timeless, collaborative work of art. Inventing new colors is not easy work; that I can say for sure, as is restoring true color that has faded to a uniform and pasty gray. Perhaps I’ll buy a jar of maraschino cherries.

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After the Fall

27 Sunday Nov 2016

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NOTE: The following is the first of a series of short stories/essays. The collection is called “Schooled Haze.”  Readers might also enjoy other works of fiction and non-fiction available at the link at the bottom of the page.

 

I have only a few scattered memories from the time before I learned to read. Like fallen autumn leaves, early memories are often brightly colored but randomly assigned far from their tree. The sight of swelling giant green ocean waves over the railing of the ship lacks attachment to any origin or destination of the voyage. The shiny red toy gun appears but no stem attaches to a giver or an occasion. My father’s quavery voice as he hunkers down in the bow of the paddle boat, cautioning us to do the same because of the airplanes overhead, held no connection to his time in the army, his wounds, or where we were.

Once formal schooling began, whether because of age or training, my memories began to connect to a framework. Whether this made my memories more accurate or less accurate still causes intra-psychic debate, but that they were different — this is not in doubt. In the first grade, we began to learn to print. I actually already knew how to print. I had taught myself before school began. I suppose that was part of the problem. Even now, I don’t make my letters and numbers with the same “strokes” that most people do. Anyway, we were supposed to be learning to print, and since I was there, I wanted to play the game along with everyone else.

With our giant awkward green pencils poised above our cheap, lined, gray-yellow paper, we were to copy our teacher’s printing. At that point, blackboards were still black and chalk was still white.  Miss Wilkins had neatly printed: “TODAY IS TUESDAY. TODAY IS TUESDAY. TODAY IS TUESDAY.” We were to fill our paper with this vital all-caps phrase. Indeed, it was Tuesday, but I really only needed to print it once to remember that. In fact, zero times would have sufficed. But, you see, there were rules in school. There were rules at home as well, but by comparison, very few. Home rules almost always made some modicum of sense, even to a six year old. School rules seemed part of some elaborate, religious, magical ritual or game imposed without explanation or exception.

Of course, this only surprised me a little because home and school smelled quite different. The black slate board had a smell, dark and clean and sharp. The chalk had a smell, that was attractive but choking. The cheap shiny paper had it’s own cheap shiny smell. And, if you took the time to notice (which most kids did), the bare wood of the giant green pencils smelled quite nice and much better than the shiny green paint part of the pencil. In fact, volunteering to sharpen pencils was a job most people were eager for, not only for the wonderful woody odor but also for the idea that we were making our own tools, and possibly our own weapons.

I understood the task at hand. I needed to fill up the page with “TODAY IS TUESDAY.” And, so I began. First I made a long vertical line for the “T” letters. Then I crossed every “T.” Then, I made a long vertical column of “O’s” and another long vertical line for the “D’s.” I began to add the bows for the “D’s.” Just as I was about halfway done with my “D-bows” however, the teacher yanked me out of my chair. She screamed as she marched me out into the hallway. Then, she grabbed me by my shoulders and shook me. As she screamed, she began to sob. I felt kind of bad for her, but I honestly had no idea what she was so upset about.

Sadly, this was not my only run-in with my first grade teacher. We also had a long debate about whether heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. She seemed quite satisfied that her example of the rock and the feather should leave any sane person convinced, but whether sane or not, it didn’t convince me. My father and grandfather were both engineers and my grandfather subscribed to Sky and Telescope, Scientific American, and The Atlantic Monthly. I probably mostly perused the pictures, but I also read articles from a very early age. Whether from reading or from talking with Dad and Grandpa, I somehow had heard about Galileo’s little experiment performed from the Leaning Tower of Pisa. I explained this to her as best I could, but she refused to believe it. Again, she gave the example of the stone and the feather. She must have thought me a bit dense.

Perhaps that is why she thought so little of it when one of my classmates pushed me down the concrete steps in front of our school door. Such a head over heels tumble presents the oddest sensations! I recall being astounded by the seemingly random jumble of images swirling by. My head didn’t feel too great either, but I think the lack of control over what I was seeing was even more disconcerting. Typically, one of the few school rules that did make sense to me was that we were not allowed to hit, kick, bite or shove other pupils. I have never felt that much inclined to injure others so I didn’t mind following this rule at all. But here I was, not having been punched or kicked, but victim of a potentially far more dangerous rule violation. At the time, I didn’t think of it so much as dangerous as it was rude. And, beyond that, it clearly constituted an egregious violation of the rules. If we were going to have all these school rules, why should they not apply to everyone? Why should someone get away with pushing me down the concrete steps when I had seen the mildest of pushes and punches get punished mightily?

At the time, I could generate no coherent explanation. The cognitive confusion about how adults failed to meet my expectations simply added to my perceptual confusion from free-fall tumbling. It seemed as though the world were saying to me, “All Bets are Off” and “Adult Authorities are Not to be Trusted” and “You never know.”

Who could be trusted, then? Well, my beautiful dog Mel for one. My Dad brought Mel back from Portugal. He was a beautiful honey-colored Cocker Spaniel. Mel loved me no matter what. A few weeks earlier, however, I had heard my parents talking about giving him away because other kids in the neighborhood were teasing him and Mel, tied up, was snapping at them. He had a wire lead connected at one end to his collar and the other end was looped around a horizontal wire. Some kids quickly saw just how far he could go and found great pleasure in getting him to run to the end of his lead and then watch his neck snap back as he reached the end. This infuriated Mel and he snarled and snapped at them. My folks were worried that a bite could lead to a lawsuit.

I made them promise not to sell Mel. And, they didn’t. When I got home from school one day, he was gone. But he hadn’t been sold at all. Not at all. He had been “put to sleep.” Our small two bedroom bungalow had one main hall closet with a blue quilt folded up at the back. That’s where I went to hang out for the next hours. I didn’t much want to talk to my parents. Not about Mel. Not about anything. It seemed to me, that if anyone should have been “put to sleep” it would be the kids who were teasing him. I just sat in the dark on the cool blue quilt crying for Mel.

Despite what my first grade teacher might think, sometimes small, light things — things even so light as a soul — can fall very fast.

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#BACK2017

27 Sunday Nov 2016

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Here is the germ of the idea. Have people see that other people are actually mostly not being greedy nasty bullies. Instead, show feedback as in the following scheme.

BACK: a Billion Acts of Compassion and Kindness. Here’s the idea. During 2017, people throughout the United States perform acts of compassion and kindness every day, particularly across potential divides like age, gender, race, religion, political party, national origin, but basically everyone counts if you’re doing it without monetary reward. We have people on Facebook and Twitter (perhaps other social media) use #BACK in their messages about it. At the end of the day, the various social media update the totals and they are posted by all participating social media. I think the results should be displayed with stickers in groups and super-groups shaped like American Flags. Every day, citizens will be reminded that there are plenty of generous people out there doing good things. By the end of 2017, I would like to see a BILLION acts reported. In some cases, all people need to do is post or tweet something very minimal such as: “Helped a non-English speaking person get directions” or “invited a LBGT couple over for Holiday dinner” “called out some absurd misogyny” or even “chalk up another one.” In other cases, maybe people have come up with a good idea that can be used by other local communities and they may want to include more details.

In the news media, there is a natural tendency to report on “bad news” which may be inherently more fascinating and attention grabbing. If you add the profit motive on top of that, it is very tempting for the mainstream media (and many sponsored sites as well) to report on outrageously bad behavior. This makes it actually *more likely* for others to think such anti-social, anti-American behavior is acceptable.Instead, if people are shown feedback that indicates the vast majority of Americans actually spend most of their time being productive contributors and some of their time helping others even when they aren’t compensated.

If we can get this going it also sends an important message to the government of other countries. “Of course, you have to deal with the official government of the USA. However, never forget that we as a nation are comprised *not* of mostly fascists but are a diverse nation of mostly good hearted people and we’re still here. Keep that in mind.”

Comments and suggestions welcome.

A Bridge too Far?

12 Saturday Nov 2016

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A Bridge Too Far? Have We Overdone Globalization?

There are many benefits to globalization. Indeed, I have been somewhat involved personally in attempting to make one of the organizations I belong too more global. In the early days of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group in Computer Human Interaction, major conferences were held in North America and most of the attendees were from North America with a good number of European colleagues joining. Over time, there have been more local chapters world wide and we have had our major conference in Europe several times and recently held a very successful conference in South Korea. Others have been held in other continents as well. I have no doubt whatever that this process has brought a wonderful diversity of thought into our field that would not be there if we had stayed focused in North America. Apart from the progress in an academic field, meeting people from all over the world provided a huge opportunity for everyone involved. If you meet decent people from all over the world, it certainly becomes more difficult to “demonize” them or desire your government to bomb them.

Similarly, the economic benefits of “Free Trade” have been touted for a long time and by many economists. Although opinions differ somewhat, most economist believe that the net effect that freer trade has had. for example, on the US economy is good, not only in providing cheaper goods for consumers but ultimately creating more jobs than are lost. Of course, if you are one of the people whose job is lost and you have almost no prospect of getting one at equal or greater pay, that is small comfort. I am willing to grant that, on average, it makes more sense from an efficiency standpoint to have the “cheapest” place produce goods and services, other things being equal.

Naturally, other things are seldom equal and jobs often shift overseas from North America and Europe to places who not only give less money to their workers but where they have very lax safety conditions, loose child labor laws, loose if any controls on environmental impact and allow harassment of workers. In addition, there can be unanticipated costs associated with coordination across time zones, cultures, and educational backgrounds. The predicted savings of moving operations overseas are not always realized.

I have seen all of these issues been addressed before but I would like to focus on another issue: the impact of situational ethics. We all like to believe that we are one of the “good guys.” We like to believe that we (and indeed, most people) behave ethically most of the time and it is only a few “bad apples” who behave unethically. When people’s behavior has actually been studied though, what we see is a more nuanced picture. Most people most of the time in most situations, cheat “a little bit” and about as much as they assume other people cheat. However, the propensity to cheat depends a lot on the details of the situation. In particular, people are more likely to cheat or take more than their fair share when they are removed from the situation.

For example, if ten people are sitting around a table passing around a plate of twenty Easter Eggs, the vast majority of people will make a quick calculation and pick two. Indeed if someone is allergic and passes on the eggs leaving two left to share among 9 people, everyone falls all over themselves to offer the eggs to someone else. It’s extremely rare for someone to start by taking six or seven eggs for themselves! No-one would think of taking all twenty!

Now, imagine instead that the Monday after Easter, I bring into my work group (which happens to have ten people) 20 Easter Eggs. I tell everyone at the morning staff meeting that I brought in 20 Easter Eggs and put them in the fridge next to the coffee maker. Let us assume that all ten of us get along pretty well. The chances that someone goes into the break room and takes 3-4 eggs increases hugely over the “sitting around the table” scenario.

 

We humans are social animals. We respond to social cues and we care about our reputation. Most of us experience empathy. If we are sitting around the table and take more than our share of eggs, we don’t just worry that others will judge us badly. We genuinely do not want to “feel the pain” of someone looking forward to the eggs and not getting any. That’s just the way we are wired. If we take more than our share from the break room however, it is far more abstract. We don’t really know whether everyone will really want Easter Eggs. And, even if we are pretty sure they will, we don’t know who the last person will be. We can’t really “see” the disappointment of the last few people who open the fridge.

Now, consider how this plays out in commerce. Imagine that you are a baker of bread for a local village. It doesn’t really matter that much whether your are the baker for a small town in Vermont, Germany, England, France or Egypt. Of course, you want to make enough money to survive, but you want to make really good bread. You want people to say good things about your bread. You want to think of these faces that you recognize having your bread be a part of the pleasure of their meal. You want to be part of having them and their family grow up and thrive because of your bread. 

Now, contrast this with being a worker in a bread factory that makes bread that is shipped all over the country. Again, it doesn’t matter that much what the country is but let’s assume it’s a factory outside of Paris. You feel some obligation to do a good job, but you are far less invested in making sure your bread is especially good than if you were the baker in a small town. Part of the reason for that is that you won’t really see that many faces of the people eating your bread. Part of the reason is also that you are following a recipe and a procedure that someone else constructed for you. Of course, other things being equal, you’d like to make a good product and do a good job — and not just because you could lose your job if you don’t. It’s more than that. Most people really do want to do a quality job. But suppose one day the boss comes in and says, “Hey folks. Bad news. Profits are down and costs are up. We are really getting squeezed. We are going to change our recipe to put a little more water and a little less egg in the bread. It will save costs and we’ll be able to stay in business. And, you’ll be able to keep your job.” You realize that this will make the bread a tiny bit less tasty and a bit less nutritious but still —- you do need to keep your job. So, you go along as do your fellow workers.

Now suppose a few months later, the boss comes in and says, “More bad news. We are going to have to cut costs still further. We are going to add more water, but to keep the bread from being too runny to bake properly, we are going to add a bit of glue. Most people won’t notice the taste and most people won’t get sick enough to die from it, although a few might. Still, we need this to keep in business.” I believe that at this point, there would be a rebellion. You would not go along with this and neither would most of your colleagues. But we need to remember that in France, there are strong unions, the population reads, there is a government that you may not agree with but that you count on to enforce laws. You may not be able to get a job as good as the bread factory job, but you will get something. If all else fails, you have friends and relatives you can count on as well as a financial safety net. You have reasonable costs for health care.

Now suppose instead that this factory is not outside Paris and shipping bread to France. Instead, let’s imagine it’s in a country that is far more authoritarian and hierarchical. You are in a small village constructed solely for the purpose of making bread at a giant factory. You are not making bread for your fellow citizens. This bread is being shipped overseas to somewhere you have very little knowledge of and no realistic prospects of ever visiting. Even under these circumstances, I believe the vast majority of people would like to do the right thing; they would like to do a good job. However, you are being told to adulterate the bread in order to keep your job. You already owe two months rent on the company housing that you would have no way to pay off without your job. You have zero other job prospects in any case. There is nothing in the town except the bread factory. You cannot call up “Sixty Minutes” or the local newspaper or the police and protest this. You know from your own personal experience that every other worker is likely to go along. And so do you. It isn’t because the people in all these previous scenarios are “good” while the ones in this scenario are “bad.” It’s because the scenario has become increasingly divorced from our natural social cues for doing the “right thing.”

In essence, this points to a “hidden cost” of globalization. It isn’t just a question of efficiency. As producers become more and more isolated from the consumers in terms of geography, culture, and physical contact and as more and more steps intervene, there is an increasing process of abstraction. Along with increasing abstraction, it becomes easier and easier for people to avoid, ignore or actively work against ethical principles. (By the way, there is another hidden cost to globalization; the bread may not be as tuned to local tastes as bread made in the village but that’s a topic for another post).

Simultaneously, there is another sort of abstraction going on. The top executives of the hypothetical “bread company” are not themselves making bread. They are not meeting with consumers. What they are looking at is numbers; specifically, they are looking at the profit and loss, ROI, their stock value. So for them, in fact, it has very little if anything to do with nutrition, bread, pleasure of eating, or ethics. It is all a numbers game. The numbers do not typically reflect much about ethics. Of course, there is a chance that poison bread may come to light and that might be slightly embarrassing, but the chance of the top executives going to jail is slim. True, they may scapegoat the local manager or some of the workers, but they themselves are fairly immune and they know this. But it isn’t only that they are immune from prosecution. It is also because they will not have to look the sick end users in the eye.

Besides the abstraction that comes from remote geography and the abstraction that comes from monetization of interaction (as opposed to actual face to face interaction), there is another kind of abstraction that makes unethical behavior easier. Discussions of driverless cars lately have quite rightly begun to focus on ethics. One scenario involves a car having to “decide” whether to run over a small number of children or veer off the road quite possibly killing the driver. Regardless of what you personally think the “right answer” is, I contend that most human drivers in control of such a car would instinctively swerve off the road and avoid the children even though it was likely to result in a serious accident or death for the driver. It would be extremely difficult for most drivers to choose intentionally to run over the children to save their own skins. On the other hand, if you worked at a car company as a programmer, it would be far less stressful to program the car to behavior in that way. It would be easy to rationalize.

“Well, the chances are, this section of code is never going to actually run.”

“Well, the driver after all is the one paying for the car. And, he or she does have the option to over-ride.”

“Well, if I don’t program what I am ordered to program, what is the point really? They will fire me and hire someone else to program it and they will keep doing that until they find somebody who will program it that way.”

All is “well.” Or is it?

But I contend that this same programmer, if they were actually driving the car, seeing the faces of little children, is quite likely to swerve off the road to avoid the kids.

Yes, we humans have developed some fairly elaborate ethical codes, but often we behave “ethically” simply because our sociality is “built in” genetically and guides us to the ethically correct behavior. If we abstract away from social situations, whether through geography, monetization of value, or by programming another entity, our “instinctive” ethical behavior becomes easier and easier to over-ride. Perhaps then, rather than making unethical behavior “easier” for people by removing social cues, we need to re-instate them — perhaps even amplify them. If you really need to send a drone into an elementary school, maybe you need to hear the screams of the unwitting “participants.”

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Honest_Truth_about_Dishonesty#/media/File:The_Honest_Truth_about_Dishonesty.jpg

http://tinyurl.com/hz6dg2