Event: AI

I regularly fume as I am caught in the chain of red lights that mark my rides down long “thruways” in the city. Why can’t we get them timed, so that we can sweep along seamless “green waves” (as transit folk call them) of travel? What is the point of AI if it can’t produce something useful for drivers? I looked it all up and discovered that even AI is stymied by the complex political forces that govern traffic rules in American cities: jurisdictions, budgets, neighborhoods, surveillance. Left-wingers are worried about bikes and pedestrians. Right-wingers—me, ­apparently—want automotive smooth sailing. But smooth sailing is not what we get, either on the roads or in life. Winds come and go, sometimes blowing in the wrong direction; tides pull this way and that. Obviously, things can get worse: gales, storms, shipwrecks even. The Old English poem “The Seafarer” is a riveting if depressing account of sailing, which often ends (I paraphrase) with men who lie “deprived of joy, robbed by the sea, death-marked on the wave.” One can try to find something encouraging amid the perilous possibilities. Consider the twentieth-century adage that “life is a journey and not a destination.” Often associated with Emerson, the phrase fits with an expansive American hope for things to go on merrily while we take in the sights. In fact, this bit of New World wisdom was first articulated by the Methodist theologian (and onetime president of Northwestern University) Lynn Hough in a 1920 “Sunday School Lesson” column he wrote for the Christian Advocate. Whatever Hough meant (I’ll get back to that), those who repeat the phrase seem to feel that destinations are for the anxious, the narrow, the prudently prudish; for clergy and religious rigorists. Instead: Open your arms! Life is a journey! There are lots…