9/11 Memory: When We Lost the Narrative

Long ago, a world ago really, I and an employee of Reynolds Aluminum refurbished old computers, mostly pre-iMac Apple product, and gave them to teachers, under-resourced schools, churches, other nonprofits, and individual families. What a perfect morning that Friday of 9/11 promised; the summer heat was gone, the sky a sublime French Blue. I was nearing Virginia Commonwealth University, driving to pick up a system with good performance, when I heard that an airliner struck the World Trade Center. It was deemed an awful accident.

My contact was weeping when she opened her apartment door. I said I could come later, figuring that some personal crisis had made her hysterical. She blurted out something about a second plane, and I knew the awful truth. We loaded the computer, and I arrived at work in time to watch both towers fall. I'd heard on NPR the developing story of the Pentagon attack and an airliner crashing in Pennsylvania. 

The world had gone sideways in 30 minutes. It never got back on track, as far as I am concerned. Briefly I was proud of how our nation came together to destroy the Taliban, who hosted the terrorists. Briefly I hoped that unity might last. Briefly I thought we might return to the narrative of consensus and compromise that I recall as marking my mid-1960s childhood.

In 2001 I was teaching first-year writing, and class met that day. One student's father was home sick; his business partner and all their employees died in one of the Towers. The man was wracked by grief and the belief that he might have saved lives had he been present. In another campus building, the bodyguards of Prince Sultan's son (one of his 32 children) rushed him off campus. He'd been a freshman for a couple of weeks. On September 12, I heard from a Kuwaiti that the Prince's plane was the only civilian airliner to fly, heading back to Saudi Arabia. While NBC news reported on some suspicious activities of another Saudi Prince who left the country that day, presumably on the same aircraft, the Richmond connection seems to have vanished from the Web. 

For a few hopeful years that followed, I taught some Afghan women who had come to the US for an education. I hoped we might rebuild that nation and keep our promises to its people. We had the world on our side for a short while. Needless to say, when the US shifted its attention to Iraq, my students' fates were sealed. They could never return home. I've lost touch with them, but I hope they got their families out.

For that reason and many more, I've never forgiven the Bush Administration for their ill-planned war in Iraq, all based upon the lies of Dick Cheney and others who wrongly connected Hussein's government to Al Qaeda. Yet the neocon right was not the only set of fools in a burning house. On 9/11, I upbraided a fellow UR employee who said, angrily, that I was "jumping to conclusions" when I said Al Qaeda had staged the attacks and we'd soon be at war in Afghanistan. His ignorance of geopolitics that I'd studied for more than a decade enraged me. In the late 80s I first read of Osama bin Laden and his apocalyptic dreams of a Caliphate. That era's Left and Right ignored this reality.

In the heat of the moment, just after the second tower fell, I told my co-worker, more or less, that he was a naive, unread fool. In 2003, I told a right-winger on campus the same about his beliefs that we'd just "clean out" the Middle East.

Yet there I was on 9/11, a Leftist giving one of my own hell. But the Left, so focused on identity politics and denouncing the United States instead of engaging in Realpolitik, lost its way. This wandering from old-school Democratic ideals helped alienate working-class voters who put a would-be tyrant into power in 2016 and 2024.

In retrospect, my moment of tongue-lashing a young liberal and all that followed changed us, including peace marches, wrapping oneself in the flag, abuse of prisoners of war, secret courts, TSA screening, and the chest-thumping patriotism by affluent families who would never let a child serve in the military. Consider the thousands of moments like those of my student who turned on the war after a best friend died in Iraq; before that, she was a naive supporter of all we did.

Such events hardened us and set us on the path to the disaster off Iran's shores now, led (if that is the word for from-the-gut decisions) by a President who makes George W. Bush look temperate, wise, and peace-loving. I'm pleased that Saddam Hussein met his fate, but that's about all that pleases me about the debacle of 2003. I suspect the current war will not have such moments of closure.

It all comes rushing back to me 25 years later. Maybe the course we took began with the contested 2000 election, but we are now living in a damaged nation, perhaps one in a steep decline. I don't know that we'll bounce back soon, as we did after Vietnam and Watergate, or even the 2008 Great Recession.

That said, our recoveries from those shocks may have included acts of willful forgetting. I'd like to forget the global events since 2001, though my personal life has been good. I'd like to return to that clear cool morning when I set out to get a computer to help a family connect to the still-novel Internet. I'd love to hear that an airliner had just missed the towers because of a navigation error. I'd like to have ended my morning right there.

Our new feeds today are full of existential dread about AI, climate change, fools who deny climate change, and a rotten President's foolish actions. Maybe we should instead reflect on how we got to this impasse and lost an earlier narrative of getting along, mostly? What sorts of short-term thinking and other priorities kept us from fixing the damage done after 9/11? 

 

Von Braun's Lost Ideas

At this time of a renewed Space Race with China, to get to the Moon's South Pole, we might want to look backward a bit. In the late 50s and early 60s, NASA's Wernher von Braun presented several ideas for long-term visits to the Moon. There's a good article that outlines the concepts from the US and USSR here. 

The German engineer's enormous lunar landers look dated, but far more stable and feasible than SpaceX's Starship Human Landing System. There were also plans for Project Horizon, with habitats buried under the lunar regolith. NASA moved away from these plans given the then-enormous expenses that lifting so much weight from Earth to orbit and beyond would incur.

Now launch costs are lower and we have several ideas for constructing building materials out of what we find on the Moon. I should be optimistic, Child of Apollo that I am. Yet I fear we are heading for disaster.

What von Braun proposed, but that got dropped then in order to beat the Russians and is not on the table now: build a reusable Moon or Mars exploration ship in orbit. The Russian space agency had such a plan, once, when their government was on friendly terms with the US. You can read about the Marsport plan here at Wikipedia. I've critiqued the idea of Starship and giantism before, but building a big ship that would go back and forth from Earth to the Moon or Mars makes great sense. The trick? Use small reusable rockets to build it from components in orbit, as we did with the ISS.

NASA currently plans a risky landing near the lunar South Pole, something Astronaut Victor Glover has critiqued, when he called instead for an equatorial landing where spots are safer and a quick return to Earth, in case of a medical emergency, more certain. The hastiness of the US/China race, as well as the political imperative to get American bootprints on the lunar before our current President leaves office, seems to be pushing the agenda. I'd have preferred an international mission led by the big space powers and a United Nations flag on the Moon this time.

Dr. von Braun's 1952 lander concept, and the real ones that followed two decades later, had broad legs for uncertain terrain. Allen B. Ury built a fabulous model of the idea.

I fear that the SpaceX's tall, narrow lander will simply topple over and kill its crew, ending the Artemis program and ceding space leadership to Beijing.

Images: Fantastic Plastic Models. They should build the real thing! 

 

Images 

TLDR: The Coming Age of Aliteracy

For many years, a good deal of digital ink has been spilled about the end of reading. Lately, however, I found compelling the statistics in Rose Horowitch's "The End of Reading is Here," at The Atlantic. I wish it were not behind a paywall. We all need to read it, even if we cannot focus long enough to finish it.

What I began noticing, incrementally, after the turn of the century is coming true: students (and adults) cannot abide focusing long enough to read anything. In 2001, I taught nine challenging texts in the university's Core class. In Spring of 2025, my most recent literature course, I taught four novel-length works. That was challenging enough, and still I caught students using AI to summarize a short story they couldn't finish, and getting an F for introducing AI hallucination into work submitted for a grade.

But the problem is hardly confined to young people, some of whom will claim that audio books serve as an adequate replacement. As Horowitch's sources note, those do not engage our brains neurologically in the same manner as printed books. Societally, we are losing the ability to retain facts in our heads, unpack difficult syntax, find connections between ideas when we farm those tasks out to machines.

So each year since the iPhone hit the scene in 2007, I've grown more and more certain that Sven Birkert's predictions in The Gutenberg Elegies have come true.

I've peers in their 60s who stopped reading. When they try now, they cannot finish the book. The addictive allure of screens is too great (an irony as I write this on a screen). A few of us who read (or write for) Hemmings Motor News have noted how the stories at the Web site grow shorter and shorter. When a long piece appears, such as the ones I write for them, at least one commenter will thank the author and editors for daring to take a "deep dive" into a topic.

How will this end? I probably will live to see a post-literate society as the norm, a world where serious reading of difficult material becomes a niche skill. Bookstores now doing well may need to stock shorter work to bring in new readers. College English Departments, as well as any teaching from books have not been in great shape for a while. They will morph or go out of business. 

All my life, I have had an eerie feeling of getting through a doorway to have it slam shut behind me. Now I feel the breeze on the back of my neck as Gutenberg's era ends. I fear a Dark Age; don't forget that in late-Roman times, students began reading synopses of classic Greek works instead of tackling the original. Then and now, long, challenging work provides depth that no synopsis or web site can. 

We have so much darkness in our own nation already from being led by an unread, unteachable man. What will come next?

And while YA lit and graphic novels, still thankfully popular, can convey great truths, what happens when they no longer serve as a stepping stone to Edith Wharton, Kazuo Ishiguro, or Toni Morrison? There's a straight line from the bombastic Marvel Comics of my pre-teens to the terrifying state advocated by Socrates in Plato's Republic, which I'm finally reading now in a lovely edition. Socrates, who mistrusted writing, would not have approved. I should have memorized the dialogue!

I plan to treasure the book and its lessons, even if no one I know can discuss it with me. So I went to ChatGPT. I have not touched an AI model since Fall 2025, when I last taught my adult-ed class "Writing With and About AI."

Me: Hello after a while. I've a specific question. Do you think that Socrates really hoped that the Greeks of his time would build a society like that in Plato's Republic? Keep your reply under 200 words. 

Chat: Good to see you again.

Probably not—at least not in a straightforward political sense. Socrates, as Plato presents him, insists that the Republic is an inquiry into justice in the soul as much as in the city. The ideal polis functions as a magnified image of the just individual.

That said, Socrates does not dismiss political reform. He famously says that cities will have no respite until philosophers rule or rulers genuinely become philosophers. This sounds like a genuine, if remote, aspiration. Yet the proposal is framed as so demanding that many readers think Plato intended it as a regulative ideal rather than a practical blueprint for fourth-century Greece.

My view is that Socrates hoped less for Athens to become the Republic than for his interlocutors to rethink what political excellence requires. The ideal city exposes the defects of existing regimes and educates philosophical judgment. Whether anyone could actually found such a city is almost beside the point.

We get here an answer that sounds less canned than those of models a year ago. I like that "my view" moment, too. There's a hook at the end, too. We could (and I may) go on about why making an ideal city-state is "beside the point."

AIs may hallucinate, but at least they did have the Plato fed to them. They'd out-debate any of my students in a Socratic dialogue.

Image Source: Gutenberg Bible, Wikipedia 

 

Your New Car is Watching You: Two Weeks in a Rolling Computer

A while back at my Tractorpunk blog, I wrote about why we should choose, if we can, to buy an older vehicle and learn to make our own repairs. I'm more convinced of this now than ever.

We had two lovely weeks in Canada recently, touring Nova Scotia, taking hikes with Anna Hergert, who runs the walking firm Tide Rollers and Mudlarkers. Anna was available off-season for some extended quality time with us. It's our second vacation hiking with her.

When we were not exploring the ocean floor of the Bay of Fundy, we were driving a rented Hyundai Tucson we picked up at the airport in Bangor, Maine. The small SUV was spacious, tastefully minimalist but comfortably appointed inside (I cannot abide busy-looking interiors). The glass dash looked very impressive. But that is where the problems began. 

As we drove along one day, a little chime sounded. An icon of a steaming cup of coffee (or maybe King Cole tea...we were in Canada) appeared on the center screen that had been clocking me in kilometers per hour. It said "Consider taking a break."

Was I driving poorly? We were on back roads, as is our wont. They are curvy and sometimes potholed. We had to move over the center line sometimes, when we could on the relatively empty roads. Yet every 45 minutes or so, I'd get that annoying message. This is part of the what the firm calls a "Driver Attention Warning System." 

Once I had it light up just after leaving a Tim Horton's where, rest assured, I had taken a cappuccino-and-donut break. I never figured out how to turn off this feature, though I did bring the owner's manual into our B&B and read it carefully.

We got the lane-departure buzzer to stop, as well as an auto-steering feature that was more scary than helpful. We never could banish the "take a break" annoyance. After much searching, we reset our speedometer to metric units, but the dizzying array on of-screen choices in the SUV meant we never found out how to turn off the coffee-cup warning. I began to talk back to the car. "Perhaps Hyundai should take a long walk off a short pier" was one bit of advice I can type here. At the very first, I'd liked the new Tucson enough to consider it as a replacement for our 2006 Honda CRV, if it ever (God forbid) bites the dust.

No longer. I will have no car that scolds me. I will also have no car that makes mistakes of the sort the Hyundai made. 

The vehicle has multiple sensors for reading the road, including speed-limit signs. Sadly, the sensors did not know how to translate these properly on the dash. For a brief period we went on the Trans-Canada Highway (speed limit 110 kph) the dash told us we could go 180! It was reading the metric signs as mph and translating them into kilometers. We had a chuckle. Then I thought about the clueless drivers I see in the US daily. I'm certain some would have put the pedal down and then explain to a Mountie "but the car said I could go 180!"

I fear where this trend might go. New vehicles are already watching us. A piece from the BBC noted how carmakers collect data from us constantly in new vehicles. It can be sold to your insurance company without your permission in the United States. When you buy a new car, be sure you know how to disable this. That said, the window for saying "no" may close. The BBC notes that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), in a February 2026 report, calls for biometric technology in all new vehicles to monitor eye and head movement for signs of distracted driving. You can read the text of the report here. I do not support this at all for adults, unless they are guilty of a DUI and subject to monitoring when behind the wheel. 

The rest of us should have the right to disable such devices. Besides, the very glass dashboard of the Tucson was designed as to distract drivers. We had to pull over to adjust the AC or heat, as the fan control was tiny and required a touch. My Honda has three large dials, like this. I can find them in the dark without looking down.

On an economic note, cars are now so wired with sensors for lane-departure, automatic braking, and other features that I fear they won't last as long as my old Honda. The HVAC controller? Under $100 to buy. The infotainment console in my wife's 2017 Mini S convertible? $10000. It works great, but we are selling that car soon. My wife's "new" 2008 Volvo XC70 AWD wagon has none of that business in the dash.

The Honda's predecessor, a 2004 model, died in 2020, when a kid rear-ended me. I'd had that 2004 CRV for 14 years. I went right out and bought a 2006, mainly because it had side airbags. I do a lot of the work myself. No advice provided by the car. No screen of any sort. Keeper.

Back to our monitored future. Want to turn this business off in a Hyundai? A simple Web search will tell you how. Or maybe if you have young, easily distracted drivers in your family, you want it on.

Your call. But do one thing: tell those who make cars and laws that you do not want them spying on you. 

 

 

 

The Next War: Robots and Orbital Chaos?

I greatly enjoy studying military history. It's less pleasant looking at ongoing conflicts, because they represent failures of diplomacy, arrogance, greed, hatred, or a combination of these factors.

Yet I do learn something of use by studying past conflicts. Despite ballistic missiles, drones, and interceptors with Iran we are fighting a version of World War 2. The battle is over oil, the commodity that led the Tojo regime to attack the US, Great Britain, and Japan's key goal, oil-rich Dutch East Indies. The US had embargoed Japan over its aggression in China, which meant they needed a new source of crude. 

What the US public does not seem to grasp today is how information, not oil, may be the commodity that makes or breaks our ability to fight, were we to stumble into a war with China or another near-peer adversary. The chances of either or us making a direct attack the other seems remote, but I'm guessing that in early 1914, few Europeans would have foreseen a global conflict erupting by year's end.

Next time, a war may mean more at home than higher prices at the gas pump. We do produce a lot of our own oil, unlike Imperial Japan. That's no great comfort in 2026. For a long time, I've looked to two works from earlier this century, Richard Clarke's and Robert K. Knake's Cyber War and P.W. Singer's 2009 Wired for War. The latter, with its depiction of massive swarms of autonomous drones, plus denial of GPS and other space-based infrastructure, now has me checking anew with Singer's other work. It can keep you up nights, thinking about how helpless many folks would be if their phone-based maps and other apps began to malfunction. Just the other day, the credit-card system at our local gas station was down. It became a cash-only business. I handed over a 20, because I always carry cash (thanks, Dad, for that lesson); other customers left, not having any cash at all on them. And if all the ATMs were down...well.

In a war, such a situation might not end in an hour. Gizmodo ran an interview with several experts on the topic, including Singer, that I recommend heavily. You may be too tired of reading about the current war to consider a future conflict; if you do, it's wise to do so early in the morning with a favorite coffee or tea cup in hand, not at night.

While there is little an ordinary citizen can do directly to cope with the loss of GPS or access to space because of  Kessler Syndrome event in orbit, it's best to at least know why such things could happen that would profoundly change our lives. Many of my students, when asked, could not point to me which direction was west, unless the sun was setting. I told them that it might be wise to learn how to navigate locally with a map, not an app, and to have some cash--a month's worth of expenses would be ideal--locked away. Don't wait until an emergency comes and the ATMs stop working or run dry.

I'm no Doomsday Prepper, but I like to have a month's worth of difficulties in mind. I read about and marvel at the sacrifices out predecessors made during World War 2, such as foregoing new tires (and cars), rationing gas and other strategic commodities. We might be asked to do the same one day.  Would we? Every hurricane, snow alert, or rare event such as the COVID pandemic leads the stores here to be sacked, as if the Visigoths had arrived.

Even if merchants could stave off hoarders, restocking shelves might prove difficult as so much of our supply chain relies on smart technologies and just-in-time delivery to manage inventories. An Amazon distribution center would likely find itself paralyzed. Attacks to our communications and Internet might not simply come from hackers or anti-satellite tech but also the destruction of fiber-optic cables and other terrestrial infrastructure that result in few direct human casualties. We have not even hardened our electrical grid to prevent a Carrington Event from damaging them, something that would only (!) cost 10 to 30 billion dollars.  I don't think that our short-sighted capitalist system, which worries about the next quarter more than the next quarter-century, can imagine spending the needed money to protect the grid from warfare. That's a government problem, I could imagine a corporate board reasoning.

History again has a lesson for us about failure to anticipate new forms of warfare. Japan lost its war against the Allies for many reasons, such as its inability to match the industry and technological might of the US, but by 1945 they were also out of petroleum beyond what they had stockpiled in the home islands. The US Army Air Corps' and Royal Navy's little-known campaign to bomb oil fields and refineries in what is now Indonesia drastically cut Japan's supply of aviation and other fuels. US subs hunted down tankers trying to bring oil home. The situation became so grave by the time of the final large naval battles in the Philippines, Japanese warships fill up on crude, not refined oil; the refineries in the former Dutch East Indies had too devastated by that point to refine enough bunker fuel.

Part of Japan's failure was not merely its dependence on distant oilfields but its inability to predict, or counter, US-led submarine warfare and strategic bombing. The Japanese, unlike their German allies, thought of subs as hunters of warships. They never used their considerable fleet of advanced subs, armed with the best torpedoes of the Second World War, as the US did. Japan never developed enough advanced aircraft capable of tackling B-29 Superfortresses that set fire to the home islands major cities long before the A-Bombs where dropped.

Iran may well teach us a few lessons yet for countering drones and asymmetrical warfare. But will be learn how to apply such lessons against a larger, better armed nation when we may not gain air superiority over their homeland, while being struck at home where our infrastructure is not hardened, or in space?

I fear that we'll all find out in the next few decades. 

Image: Spacewar! computer game, Wikipedia 

A Good Counterpoint for Orbital Data Centers

I got an F in Thermodynamics, shortly before I flunked out of UVA's Aerospace Engineering program.

So I leave matters such as cooling satellites to experts, and recently I came across a concern about data centers in space: can they scale to the size we need for AI? Forget issues of space debris and power. The Reverse Salient, in Hughes terms, appears to be cooling.  

The article here discusses, in somewhat technical terms that should still be understood by the non-engineer, the reasons that what engineers call "radiational cooling" in space may not work for the amount of heat generated by orbital data centers. Perverse thought, no? Space is either hideously hot in the sun or deadly cold in the shade. But the problem involves moving heat away from the object in question. There's no breeze in vacuum; any water would boil off or freeze solid. Read the article for more technical details.

This year we will find out if orbital data centers can scale. I hope so. We simply do not have the energy resources or land for the types of AI economy the billionaires envision. The Carbon pollution alone might seal our fate.

NVIDIA, many other US firms, and the Chinese space program, are testing the concept now or will be this year. I wish them luck. We need to get this right.

I'm increasingly of the belief that we'd be better off had AI not been invented, a thought I also have about smart phones and social media, but like those technologies AI is not going to be wished away. 

Image source: Daily Galaxy, Creative Commons image 

Another CCCC, Another Rejection of AI

At face value, the latest rejection of AI in writing classrooms from the Conference on College Composition and Communication does not sound like a radical document. It calmly frames the issue in terms of students' and faculty members' rights to choose how to teach and learn. 

It's also out of touch with how so many universities are being run. Once again, as I did last year, I will issue a brief rebuttal. One of the issues below could be easily addressed. The other? Not so handily.

• Realities of how classes get scheduled and listed
  
  If students have the right to opt out of AI in any course they take, it would create chaos for instructors. Those like me who scaffold AI into assignments do so in ways not possible without these applications. Students would not know until they saw a syllabus how (or if) AI would be employed in a class.
  
  The resolution claims that "Professors should additionally respect a student’s choice to refuse AI. To do this, it would be ideal that they have assignments that students can choose from that do not involve generative AI and that do not isolate the students from class discussions and activities."
  
  My podcasting assignment requires the use of ElevenLabs software. Would I then give students who refuse a second option? My classes are small. I could do that. But what happens in large courses that enroll many dozens of students?
  
  One work-around would be for registrars to flag courses that use AI. Then students could exercise their rights to chose accordingly.
  
  
• The reality of who teaches writing and who makes the decisions
  
  The document rightly notes that "Generative AI is but the latest version of this neoliberal approach to efficiency and expediency," but then it does not give instructors advice about how to counter this trend with senior administration that follows neoliberal principles. The authors rightly note as well that we work in "a profession that has long dealt with labor issues and that continues to rely considerably on frequently underpaid contingent, adjunct, and graduate student labor."
  
  So how, exactly, would such at-will employees say "no" when a university requires AI literacy in its curriculum? Here I'll speak bluntly: the tenured faculty on the committee that drafted this resolution should have known better. That sort of Ivory-Tower elitism in 2025 led me to leave the CCCC.
  
  NCTE leadership understands well the contingent nature of writing instruction and the realities of who now has the power of the purse at our institutions. 
  
  Perhaps these same authors can fight for better governance at colleges and universities, so the voiceless and underpaid have more of a role in shaping policy? Perhaps more tenured faculty could teach more writing-intensive classes? Such teachers do have more power to refuse AI and shape policy around its adoption on campus.
  
  It seems my old profession (well, I still pursue it part-time) is lost in the fog, as industry lays plans for orbital constellations of data-centers and AI apps pop up on our phones without our asking. This will not end well for CCCC, which doesn't bother me. But it does bother me that many teachers of writing may be hurt in the process.

Update, July 2026: I have rejoined the NCTE as a retiree, and I now receive their journal aimed at K-12 language-arts teachers. I changed course partly because NCTE distanced itself from the radical stance of the CCCC by issuing a pragmatic framework for educators who may not be able to say no to AI initiatives. 

Image: Creative-Commons "The campanile at UC Berkeley shrouded in fog." by Daniel Parks at Flickr

A Conversation By Economists About AI

I had the pleasure of attending a "Sharp Viewpoints" event on my old employer's campus, where Dr. Kevin Hallock, university President, hosted two economists with expertise in AI, UVA's Anton Korinek and MIT's David Autor.  The subject, AI and The Future of Work, should concern us all.

I hope not to misrepresent what I heard, but all three experts on stage consider it inevitable that AI will continue to advance rapidly and that it will disrupt careers in fields such as Finance, Computer Science, and Accounting. These have been popular majors for my former students. The scope of the disruption and what happens to wages, as AI takes on more white-collar tasks, remain to be seen. Korinek cited a ninefold increase in the capacity of AI systems annually, from a 2.5x increase in efficiency times a 4x increase in capabilities. 

Korinek warned the audience that we have a small window of time to prepare for resultant changes without chaos in the economy, though Autor felt that if we were to see a gradual loss of a profession, which he called "generational," our economic health could be sustained. He did warn that nothing on the scope of 10% of jobs lost annually could be tolerated without an upheaval. 

Both speakers likened gradual change to, say, automating trucking. The industry would slowly shed human drivers over time, because prior investment in vehicles and warehouses can't be profitably junked overnight. As older drivers retire, however, gradually fewer young people would enter the field and robots would take on the work of moving cargo on the highways. 

As for me? Whoever or whatever does the driving, I still prefer trains for 90% of the hauling, with a truck doing the final leg of the journey. 

The mood was cautiously optimistic, but I'm no optimist. My dad loved being a long-haul trucker. He was not as happy when he ran a wholesale produce company, though that enabled him to put away some money for when he retired. He preferred "the Road" to the security of a desk, and he passed that love of highway travel on to me.  Driving have him a purpose. Yet dad, in retirement, did not begin to write poetry, learn Greek, or play golf. He watched TV and was bored while living on his social security and investment income.

Something the speakers did not address to my satisfaction: if we do have a future without nearly as many jobs for humans, what do many people without side interests or hobbies or talents do with their time? I'm not a good model: I've stayed more busy than ever since leaving full-time employment.

I ask my question, a Humanist's response, assuming that some sort of basic universal income would arise; Author prefers not a monthly dole but a universal basic investment fund for every citizen, beginning at birth. 

Without it, I suspect we'd have some sort of Butlerian Jihad of the mass unemployed, to smash the data centers, and frankly, I'd support smashing them if the alternative meant vast numbers of destitute folks existing alongside a tiny elite empowered by AI. Our speakers did note how this sort of future could emerge, endangering democracy. I'd argue it already is emerging under the broligarchs of Silicon Valley and our current Administration.

Yet with income for all in a jobs-free future, we might have a lot of folks on a dole, not hiking or painting but watching TV and not contributing to our civilization. In my darkest hours, I also think we already have that, without a dole in the US. 

It's better to have a purpose. I didn't hear much discussion of "what does it mean to be a human?" in last night's one-hour chat. Of course, that sort of discussion has been going on among philosophers for millennia, even before Socrates began to question people at Athens' Agora. 

Both Korinek and Autor did fear a rise in inequality, as wages might fall while AI-copiloted productivity rises. That said, everyone agreed that we will have new jobs emerge, some of them related perhaps to newly found leisure time. Autor reminded us that 100 years ago, 38% of Americans worked in agriculture. Today under 2% do. But a person in 1926 also could not image the types of careers many of us now have. Nor did they have our concept of leisure time. A video-game developer's career would have been as alien as a Man from Mars.

Fair point, but when (according to them, not if) AI and humanoid robots replace most human labor, including game design, what will most of us do to find a purpose?

What will colleges do? Korineck, bless him, as well as Hallock, upheld the value of the Liberal Arts for coming to grips with essential and enduring questions. Autor, while nodding to the value of liberal education, said he'd be more "crass" to note that a college degree also means more income and professional training. I don't disagree with him, yet marrying some careerist coursework to a passion for something seems wiser than choosing a "safe" major in a field that bores you.

The even left me unsettled. If the future they predict comes, I'd begin by having students read Plato's Republic and The Federalist Papers with me, for two explanations of what a society can do to organize itself against chaos.

If you want to see a video of the talk, UR recorded it. Thanks to Fred Hagemeister at Richmond for sharing the link.

Giantism and The Moon Race

The race is on, with the Artemis 2 mission coming as soon at early next month. I'm hoping to see it and future endeavors work well, so humanity begins a long voyage to the stars as a multi-planet species. I know that sounds odd in a blog about minimalist living and self-reliance for rural life, but to me the space program has always been about learning new techniques for doing things here on Earth, about new materials, for instance, that went into cordless tools I use as a DIYer or insulation I use to cut our energy costs. Splitting-maul and Moon rocket? Why not?

I've spoken at length about this with futurist Bryan Alexander, who shares my love for space travel. We are both puzzled by a rejection of human exploration by many on the Left and from the environmental movement. It amounts to a form of neo-Luddism at a time when many nations and companies are pursuing reusable launch vehicles. NASA's big SLS Moon rocket is not, save for the Orion capsule.

What critics ignore is how money is already being made in the heavens and how seemingly silly tourist flights resemble early aviation's first paying passengers. I don't think there's any way to stop this next Space Age, save for a Kessler Event (the film Gravity depicts that) making launches untenable and sends telecom back to the 1960s. 

I'd claim that moving human energy and heavy industry into space would be a godsend for our home planet's ecosystem, especially when cleaner rocket fuels come into play. You'll find a few ideas about that here. As much as I dislike the billionaire associated with SpaceX, he has one thing right: we need to begin moving some of our people and energy off-planet. That does not mean abandoning our world to the slow ecocide currently under way.

At the same time, I've written of his megalomaniacal plans for Starship at my other blog; I suspect the derivative called the Human Landing System (HLS) will prove a disaster the first time it tries to land on an unprepared lunar surface. To me it's as bad an idea as von Braun's Nova rocket of the late 1950s, also marketed to NASA as a Moon rocket when its maker was really trying to build a Mars rocket in disguise and with public monies. Both Nova and HLS would try to land a skyscraper-sized rocket on the Moon.

The current US President, who pays no attention to details save those concerning his enormous ego, is pushing us to land by 2028, the final year (I hope) of his Administration. Doing that would beat China's measured program, which plans to land astronauts by 2030. I suspect the Chinese will make that deadline, and we'll lose an HLS lander or, worse, lives trying to beat that arbitrary date. 

Perhaps Jeff Bezos' Blue Moon, an alternative lander from Blue Origin of less monstrous proportions, can get American (and I hope international partners') boots on the Moon safely and even begin the work of building a permanent settlement there. If we think small about getting there (to stay this time) we might do better than SpaceX's giantism.

By the time we make that next giant leap, we may also have national leadership that is not anti-environmental yet still pro-Space. We may then have both well-funded science and human exploration / settlement happening beyond orbit.

It's one of the things that still gives me hope in a difficult time. 

Reason 11 For Not Building Data Centers Now

A few stories recently caught my eye about moving data centers away from where we live, far away, in fact.

 China's government plans to test space-based data centers starting in 2026, with a rollout of ones with costs as low or lower than earth-based centers slated for the 2030s. Meanwhile in the States, Amazon's Jeff Bezo has hatched similar plans. Not to be left behind by his billionaire rival, Elon Musk wants to use his Starship mega-rockets to orbit data centers. Then there's Google Starcloud, with a test planned for 2027. That system would also depend upon something like Starship to make the venture cheap enough to construct.

At first blush, it seems like a crazy idea, but as I considered the benefits versus costs, it makes sense to move this industry skyward:

• With reusable rocket boosters, costs to orbit per kilogram have dropped radically in recent years. If Starship prospers and others copy its model, we'll see the door opened for very cheap rocket launches.
• We have abundant solar energy in orbit. There's no need for generators, nuclear reactors, or natural gas.
• We also have easy cooling, without using water. Rotate a satellite and you have a solar heating on one side, the utter cold of space on the other.
•  Space-based data centers need not be huge to do their job. They could be a constellation of large satellites that talk to each other, as Starlink does already. Right now, however, big centers seem to be the model for space-based construction.
• If we do go big, we know how to do this already thanks to the International Space Station. 
• Parts of orbital centers can be replaced with one launch, and the old centers can be upgraded by robots or small enough to burn up on a deorbit. 
• Beaming data to ground stations 200 miles away on Earth is not a problem. We already do this.

My hope is that this technology will mature fast, to avoid more environmental and social disruption on Earth. And closest to home, I hope my County's Board of Supervisors pays attention, before we end up with a huge and obsolete building placed on agricultural land next to residences.

One issue that does bother me, beyond the possible climate-change effects of launching so many rockets?

It's called The Kessler Effect (or Syndrome). Readers may have seen the film Gravity, which one explosion in space results in a cascading set of collisions and, consequently, a massive cloud of space debris hurtling around 10 miles per second, chasing an underwear-clad Sandra Bullock.  

How serious is a collision in space? I once saw a piece of Space Shuttle Challenger's front windows, removed from a mission before the craft's 1986 catastrophe. The section of thick glass was damaged badly by hitting a tiny fleck of paint tossed off some forgotten rocket-booster, perhaps decades earlier. Now imagine millions of these objects, large and small, forming a cloud around the Earth, making any rocket launches an exercise in futility, destroying telecom networks, and grounding human space travel for many decades. Or centuries.

A center as large as Starcloud makes for a huge target, were the Kessler Effect to begin. 

Belatedly, firms and governments are considering ways to mitigate space debris and harden orbital infrastructure. Let's hope they get is right, as they'll only have one opportunity. I'd like to get my data from the heavens, not from Earth with more carbon pollution and wasted groundwater.

image: Starcloud center from Google video 

A Strangely Easy Idea No Writing Teacher Has Discussed

I may be out of the loop here, but I've come up with a simple idea that may be grant-worthy. Yes, steal it. Beat me to the grant. The consequences for students' learning may be too great for me to worry about being the first to put my name on it.

What I propose is simple: a writing environment online with the ease of Google Docs, but with one enormous feature disabled: copy/paste. In that regard, it would resemble the Respondus Lockdown Browser. 

The difference? Faculty would organize their classes and assignments there, as with a learning-management system, but they would pick certain AI tools that could employed at each stage of the writing process. The tools would work only from within the writing environment, and the final stages of each step--from rough-draft to revision to later drafts--would be sent from within the browser to the faculty member, along with how each writer used any AI tools permitted.

In that regard, my writing environment looks something like an educational version of Grammarly that an executive once demoed for me. In that product, all work copied and pasted into to interface would be watermarked and AI tools could be disabled or enabled by the user. I'd put that power in the hands of the course instructor, where it belongs. As students tell me again and again, using AI is simply the norm now, and we faculty are wasting time focusing on detecting plagiarism with AI detectors I don't trust. Time and again, studies I've read indicate that they turn up too many false positives. 

My idea requires some coders adept at building a good client and we'd have to negotiate licensing for AI programs such as Research Rabbit, an LLM, a image / slide-deck generator, and multimedia tools such as ElevenLabs' podcast and text-to-voice generators.

By placing the tools within the writing environment and forbidding copy/paste from outside, drafting by cognitive offloading would no long be an issue. 

I'm currently talking to a few colleagues who run our AI cluster on campus. I hope to have something sketched out, and if we can find the coders and money, tested in 2026.

Creative-Commons Image courtesy of oercommons.org 

Ten Arguments Against Hyper Data Centers

 

We lost the vote in Goochland County; 4 of 5 Supervisors voted to approve a Technology Overlay District (TOD) and Technology Zone that could include data centers. We learned that a likely center would be two million square feet, or 3000' x 200' in size. That's three times the length of USS Nimitz supercarrier or twice the square footprint of the Short Pump Town Center, a huge outdoor mall about 20 minutes from where I live. I've always hated Short Pump and that mall in particular; it was once prime farmland where a friend stabled her horse. It's now a suburban asteroid belt.

The proposed data center is worse. And soon it may be utterly obsolete. I commend to you articles by Bryan Alexander and Noah Smith about why this entire industry could soon find itself in deep trouble and why that matters to the larger economy. 

Other localities will be fighting data-center behemoths that use enormous amounts of energy and water. Their parking lots create heat-islands and they lower property values. It's likely we citizens will be taking the county to court, as plans were modified at the final moment to include 900 additional acres without public discussion. The entire process seemed rushed through, perhaps spurred on by money from industry, before a new Governor in January. She has promised to develop a statewide strategy. I hope so, and perhaps it can preempt the sort of hasty decisions made here. My state has more data centers than any other.

So what are arguments that money-hungry county officials will heed? Quality-of-life issues may help, but I think environmental concerns, sadly as usual, fall on deaf ears. Our nation's brand of capitalism, one I despise, values short-term thinking and profiteering. I'm a Distributist, not a Socialist; I want capital held and decisions made by the largest number of citizens possible. I want data centers small and as rare as possible. 

In any case, here are 10 technical and economic arguments to make with your local officials as you organize against this bonanza. They are based on my remarks at our recent county meeting. You can share these in 3 minutes at a meeting, if you practice! 

1.  AI drives this rapid growth in data centers. 
2. The AI industry is not turning a profit and has shown only limited ROI for hundreds of billions in venture capital and now, risky loans. Subscriptions make up a tiny portion of revenue.
3. The current model of AI relies on “brute force” computing to simulate human reasoning. This method requires huge data centers that drive up electric bills for ratepayers, and it uses lots of ground water. The Microprocessors in data centers need to be replaced every few years, meaning short life-spans for their hardware. 
4. Real “Artificial General Intelligence” (aka AGI or “Superintelligence”) is unlikely with silicon-based semiconductor technology, yet AGI is the stated goal of OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google.
5. Without more powerful new models, investment may well leave this sector, as 80% of firms that have already deployed current AI models have shown no gains in productivity. 
6. While Meta and Google have varied sources of income, other big AI firms are one-trick ponies. If the gold-rush turns into a bubble that bursts, it will harm the entire economy. What would happen in your locality when a data center goes dark, its owner bankrupt?
7. NVIDIA just announced a new Spark workstation that brings hardware-based AI to developers’ desktops. Coders no longer need to send work to data centers for processing. 
8. Soon consumer devices will have this capacity.  When we have AI-on-a-laptop or phone, which is Apple’s goal for Apple Intelligence, the data-center boom will likely go bust. 
9. Does your locality want to build power-hungry, thirsty data centers that may be obsolete in a few years? 
10. Quality-of-life issues are a form of return on investment. Start with that, not data centers.

Image source: first try with ChatGPT 5 for prompt "Generate an image of a two million square foot hyper data center in ruins." 

AI Bubbles and My County: Saying "Not Yet" to Big Data Centers

Note to readers: A version of this post will be submitted to our Board of Supervisors as a formal letter, as well as to a local news outlet. We'll see if it even makes a ripple. 

Even those wary of AI agree that it can do clever work. I use it regularly with students to shape their writing ethically and to design assignments. But can the industry make enough money to continue its progress? A great deal hinges on that answer, including development on the western border of the Richmond Metro Area.

A proposal before Goochland’s Board of Supervisors would allow data centers, perhaps powered by small nuclear reactors, to be built along the Route 288 corridor. Even without considering the environmental hazards, as one who researches the industry, I’ve found economic risks of rushing off quickly to join this AI gold-rush.

CEOs constantly make utopian claims about AI's future, but numbers cloud those predictions. Subscriptions such as mine meant under $2.5 billion in revenue for ChatGPT maker OpenAI in the second half of 2024, according to sources that include The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The rest came from venture capital or circular investing, such as Nvidia's and Microsoft's massive stakes in OpenAI.

The firm estimates that building out its data centers would cost $400 billion. For such ambitious plans, companies need a lot more revenue to balance their books. An "AI Bubble" may be inflating, as several economic journalists have warned. Writing for The Atlantic, Rogé Karma notes that “In the first half of this year, business spending on AI added more to GDP growth than all consumer spending combined.” A crash in the AI sector would deal devastating blows to the economy, with local effects when superfluous data centers go dark.

For his part, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman focuses on big ideas that seem straight from science fiction. He writes that humans and computers will become one form of life soon, which he calls “The Merge.” I'll quote from his blog, "unless we destroy ourselves first, superhuman AI is going to happen, genetic enhancement is going to happen, and brain-machine interfaces are going to happen." Not all of us would call such things progress, but history shows us that technological breakthroughs take time and a lot of money. Quiet supersonic airliners and nuclear fusion plants have inched closer to reality, over decades.

It well may take that long for AI data centers to not increase ratepayers’ electric bills. We’ve seen that already from existing data centers in the Commonwealth. Before we consign so much open land to data centers locally, let’s consider what experts in the field who are not CEOs or marketers have to say.

A robotics researcher, hired away from my university by Google, insisted to me that human-level thinking cannot be engineered; at best we might imperfectly simulate it, at great expense via a "brute force" computing method run in huge data centers. I recently noted in class how we might improve that, given faster computing using fewer chips, following what’s called Moore's Law. A student challenged me, claiming that silicon-based chips have not enjoyed the leaps in power and speed we expected annually up through the early 2000s.

Several academic papers I looked up support that idea. Without new types of microprocessors or exotic quantum computing, we are stuck with today’s data centers. Concurrently, our AI models remain far from perfect. Alex Reisner of The Atlantic, as well as academic researchers, found developers fudging benchmark tests that measure AI's smarts. They give the software test questions in advance, a tactic beloved by college students for many years. When AI is faces novel tasks, however, it scores far lower. Rogé Karma’s investigative work bears this out; productivity of coders dropped by 20% when working with AI, as they spent more time correcting mistakes.

Other Bubbles have popped with local consequences. A few years ago, I addressed The Board of Supervisors, whose agenda that night included motions to increase suburban-style growth in the east end of the county. I opposed this for many reasons, but one stood out: we had made zoning changes before based on empty promises, when we developed an office park called West Creek for an anchor client, Motorola. Their semiconductor plant would, in theory, have provided many hundreds of jobs.

My late father-in-law, Edward Nuckols, had addressed the Supervisors in the 90s. He was a respected master mechanic and businessman with deep ties to the community; his auto shop, unlike Motorola, had been in operation here for decades. Ed warned that big companies change their minds.

So it came to pass: Motorola backed out of their promises and Goochland was left with over $100 million in debt. One Supervisor reminded me that the county had little choice but to search for other revenue streams to repay that sum. While a fair counterargument, it does not seem we have learned much. Even if Altman and other CEOs are right, such men have no ties to any locality save the posthuman utopias they dream of inhabiting. $100 million of debt means nothing to them.

I’d love to see cheaper, more sustainable AI as a partner in our work. Today's models such as ChatGPT 5, Anthropic Claude, as well as lesser known but powerful tools such as NotebookLM or Research Rabbit, greatly help my students. We engineer prompts to find credible sources that are not hallucinated, we check human-created work for accuracy and voice, we write scripts for podcasts that AI converts to broadcast-quality audio. Plagiarism, the bugaboo of academic AI, concerns me less than does helping my students gain skills for workplaces slowly adopting AI.

My classes emphasize critical thinking when working with AI. So I'll ask Goochland's Board of Supervisors to do some critical thinking and research not influenced by the hype of Silicon Valley's billionaires. Altman claims intelligence will soon be "too cheap to meter." Older folks will recall that fable about electric bills, one made in the 1950s and 60s.

Otherwise, we could be left with more debt and large, empty buildings crumbling in the rain along 288. 

Creative Commons Image: Bioethics.com 

Are Humanists All Like This? Tyler Austin Harper's Strange Ideas About AI on Campus

 I'm fond of The Atlantic; I've subscribed for more than 4 decades. I also enjoy Tyler Austin Harper's articles; his 2024 piece on extreme fishing really moved me with its stories of combat veterans risking their lives at night, swimming out in deep water to find offshore rocks, all to catch striped bass. Austin tried that sport himself; his participation added vividness to his journalism.

As a professor, he is likewise a participant when writing about education. Thus he should know enough about students to avoid the impracticable, even ludicrous, ideas in his newest article, "The Question All Colleges Should Ask Themselves About AI." The title drew me right in, as I too am concerned that institutions of higher education do not comprehend the scope of AI usage by students or what that may portend for their learning. 

So much damage has already been done, before LLMs arrived to thwart the critical-thinking skills we faculty hold so dear. We live in a time when phones and social media have sapped the attention spans and reading comprehension of all ages, and when students from taught-to-the-test K-12 US education lack the ability to construct narratives around the content they do encounter in class. Instead, they often ask me for a rubric and or checklist. When I ask "tell me what you think most interests you from our topic," I usually get blank or anxious looks.

Harper's piece begins in this territory, with worries we share. Soon, however, he turns to a "solution" by Megan Fritts, from U Arkansas at Little Rock, calling for a ban on AI use in the Humanities classroom.

That stance seems not too different from the CCCC Chair's address I rebutted here some time back. I canceled my NCTE membership this year in response to that extremist stance by the organization's leadership.

Yet the similar philosophy that Fritts embraces proves not radical enough for Harper:

Shunning AI use in classrooms is a good start, but schools need to think bigger than that. All institutions of higher education in the United States should be animated by the same basic question: What are the most effective things—even if they sound extreme—that we can do to limit, and ideally abolish, the unauthorized use of AI on campus?

Harper's drive to "abolish" includes: 

• Getting rid of WiFi, laptops, and phones on campus
• Making all writing assignments be done in labs without Internet access 
• Making all students live on campus
• Ending accommodations for neurodiverse students if they include AI (human helpers would fill the gap, as they did before) 
• Penalizing heavily any students caught using AI for academic work, including expulsion.

I began to check to see if he were writing for The Onion, ending with a call for wax tablets for all written work. I can imagine such a  policy at my employer, leading to a 95% drop in applications. I can also imagine new AI-friendly schools, many for-profit, rushing to fill the gap.  I can envision ADA-based lawsuits by neurodiverse learners and their parents.

I won't go on more except to say that Harper's draconian and neo-Luddite solution is not a realistic answer.

Instead I'll end with a question that Fritts asks near the start of her article, as she and others on an AI Committee wrestle with the signature pedagogical challenge of our time, "If this robot can write these books better than we can, then what are we doing here?" Well asked. 

Unless we faculty can add value to AI-written content, maybe we don't deserve jobs any more. I've wondered that since the "Theory Wars" in English and related fields of the late 80s and early 1990s. Poorly aping French Post-Structuralist Theory, faculty in PhD programs ruined the lives of many a graduate student and likely turned off legions of potential undergrads who might have studied literature. I saw this in dozens of cases at Indiana University's PhD program. 

At that time, we lost the thread of meaning--and damn the Deconstructionists who managed to deconstruct meaning out of our field. But the meaning destroyed was not only in texts that lacked narrative cohesion under the scrutiny of theory; the meaning lost included the joy (or jouissance, if you read Barthes) of studying literary work and finding connections to improve one's own life.

Fritts takes us back before my field's epistemological disaster, when she notes that "the aim of our disciplines is the formation of human persons." If we start there, enshrining that principle as the most important one that a college or university (in any discipline) can answer, we have made a good start.  

Image: OpenArt, Cambridge University in Ruins 

ChatGPT 5 Passes "The Big Log Test"

You may recall that some time back, I had a hilarious exchange with an earlier version of ChatGPT about Robert Plant's song "Big Log." Now that version 5 appeared, I wanted to see if the AI would still insist that the song had anything to do with logs made of wood.

No rolling logs this time. The AI did some speculating, but not hallucinating. 

I find the exercise playful, something lacking in anti-AI resistance from one important organization in my field. At the same time, The Big Log Test shows how quickly the AI has reduced its hallucinations. I'd invite readers to try something similar with a favorite song/book/film/TV series that may have an aspect that could confuse an AI. Here we go: 

Prompt: This is a routine check I do as your model improves. I'm curious about any meanings in Robert Plant's song "Big Log." Why do you think he chose that title for his song? Do you see any clues in the lyrics? 

Reply:

Good check-in question — "Big Log" is one of Robert Plant’s more mysterious titles. The lyrics themselves are impressionistic, dreamlike, and full of wandering imagery: travel, desire, distance, loneliness, fate. The phrase “Big Log”*never appears in the song, so the title works more like an oblique symbol or signpost. A few possibilities that critics and listeners have suggested:

1. Truckers and Highways – In trucking slang, a “log” is a driver’s logbook, and a “big log” could mean a long haul or a long road. Since the song is steeped in imagery of roads, headlights, and endless travel, the title could gesture toward the journey itself.

2. Nature and Obstacle – A literal “big log” might be something blocking a path, a metaphor for distance, fate, or emotional barriers. The lyrics’ recurring sense of inevitability (“My love is in league with the freeway…”) could fit this interpretation.

3. Wordplay and Surrealism – Plant often uses surreal or playful titles (e.g., “In the Mood,” “Heaven Knows”). “Big Log” may simply be an evocative, earthy phrase chosen to contrast with the ethereal quality of the lyrics and music.

4. Personal/Private Reference – Sometimes Plant titles songs with private jokes, fragments of conversation, or studio nicknames. It’s possible “Big Log” had an offhand origin unrelated to the lyrics, and he leaned into its strangeness.

Clues in the lyrics point strongest to the *travel/journey* theme: headlights, the freeway, endless searching, being pulled by forces outside oneself. “Big Log” might stand in as the symbolic “record” of that journey — the unending trace of desire and distance.

Follow-Up Prompt: So there are no references to logs in the song?

Reply:

That’s right — there are no actual references to logs (trees, wood, or otherwise) in the lyrics of “Big Log.”

The imagery in the song is all about roads, headlights, distance, fate, longing — not forests or lumber. That’s part of what makes the title puzzling: it seems deliberately disconnected from the lyric surface.

If anything, the best textual “bridge” is the idea of a logbook (the record of a journey), which fits the recurring highway and travel motifs. But Plant never makes that link explicit in the words of the song.

Would you like me to give you a quick “lyrics-only” close reading to show how the imagery develops (and where a title like Big Log might feel thematically tethered, even if indirectly)?

Follow-Up Prompt:

You have clearly evolved. Earlier chats references rolling logs, fallen logs, and so forth. Good work.

Reply:

I’m glad you noticed that difference! Earlier, I sometimes filled the “gap” in the title by speculating more literally — things like fallen trees or rolling logs. With another pass at the song, though, it’s clear Plant never brings that imagery in, so it’s more faithful to stick with the journey / logbook / metaphorical record angle.

Plant’s titles often have that teasing quality — they look literal but carry some private or surreal weight (a kind of wink at the listener). “Big Log” works almost like a signpost planted alongside the road of the song, rather than a description of what’s in it.

 

 

From Antiquity, a Reason Why AI-Generated Writing is not "Great"

Every year, I read at least one text (in translation) from Antiquity. I find that the long-term perspective gets me through the bumps in life's road. I'm currently reading On Great Writing (or if you will, On the Sublime) by Longinus, in a Hackett Classics edition I picked up at an academic conference's book room.

G.M.A Grube makes the work come to life; we know so little about Longinus (the author lived between the 1st Century BCE and the 3rd CE, that the text passes my "castaway reader" test. Here we go: a work washes up intact on your desert island. Yay, something to pass the time! Yet you have no information on the author, and no secondary sources. You must use the actual words on the page to come to a conclusion about the work's meaning.

Longinus talks about many aspects of what constitute "the Sublime" in excellent writing,  but one passage late in the text commends itself to my current students in "Writing With and About AI." I've said since 2022 that AI prose is "voiceless," and Longinus gives reasons why some prose most moves us:

Which is to be preferred in poetry and prose, great writing with occasional flaws or moderate talent which is entirely sound and faultless?. . . . It is perhaps also inevitable that inferior and average talent remains for the most part safe and faultless because it avoids risk and does not aim at the heights, while great qualities are always precarious because of their very greatness.

Bad student writing is slap-dash, one-draft work that has no coherence. No wonder bored or harried students turn to AI! At the same time, why not simply give all such technically correct, but average work what it should earn: a C? AI produces good, boring, safe prose. Many students who pair moderate talent with immoderate anxiety already do that. I never give them an A. For years I've said "this piece takes no intellectual risks. You are writing to please me, not learn something new."

In Nancy Sommers' excellent short films from the 1990s about writers at Harvard, I recall how one fourth-year student said that he learned to begin with what he did not know, starting with a question. This remark changed how I taught writing. I'm going to press my current adult students to do the same: begin with what you DON'T know. As Longinus warns us, "A world-wide sterility of utterance has come upon our life."

In discussion with ChatGPT 5 recently, I asked it about the role of human labor in a a time when automation already takes some entry-level jobs. It replied, summing up a short list of human skills essential to success, "the future may need fewer button-pushers and more meaning-makers."

Good writing sways us, it shows us the meaning past the words. It says with us, like the remark by that Harvard student. So this term, I'm asking more, not less, of my writers even as all of them use AI in their assignments. The machine as raised the bar on what constitutes excellence.

image: Raphael's The School of Athens (Wikipedia)

 

A Stunning Lack of Search Results From Universities

As a staunch supporter of an open Internet, where advice can be freely shared, I'm stumped by the lack of results form a few simple Duck Duck Go queries:

• University sources Podcast Scripting for AI 
• College guides Podcast scripting for AI 

Fordham's page on using ElevenLabs proved the only hit that was not from some start-up trying to hawk AI services. This outcome discourages me greatly. Here's why.

Universities, even ones under the hammer of Federal and state funding cuts, have robust I.T. presences.  Internal materials for faculty and students can be shared with no more than a few high-level links. To me the lack of materials portends either a lack of care about reaching beyond the campus gates (a sad lack of marketing savvy) or, more ominously, that colleges and universities are as ill-prepared as Ian Bogost claims in his recent Atlantic piece, "College Students Have Already Changed Forever." Bogost notes that "plenty of professors are oblivious. It isn’t that they fail to understand the nature of the threat to classroom practice. But my recent interviews with colleagues have led me to believe that, on the whole, faculty simply fail to grasp the immediacy of the problem. Many seem unaware of how utterly normal AI has become for students. For them, the coming year could provide a painful revelation."

One would think that schools such as Washington U at St. Louis, where Bogost is on the faculty, would do a great deal, as Ohio State has begun with its recent initiative. I found this page on AI resources at Washington University, but you must scroll to the bottom to get resources for faculty. Mostly, the page emphasizes new degree programs for students. Digging in a bit, I found this page for teaching activities, a page on an AI summer institute, and some philosophical advice about how to design assignments. Why don't such in-house materials appear higher in search results than those of peddlars of their software solutions? "They didn't give us any money" would be the answer for Google, but for Duck Duck Go, it seems dubious.

My hunch is that our schools are so overwhelmed that "sharing the wisdom" remains a very low priority. 

Luckily and of more use to faculty, The WAC Clearinghouse has launched an initiative to build a library of open-access lesson plans for AI. I'm still not sure why universities have left it to a talented group working across our institutional boundaries to do this. I'd claim that Generative AI poses the largest challenge to how we educate in a long time, categorically different from the coming of the Internet.

image: a really lame prompt and result, "Impressionistic image of traditional campus Humanities building with students going to class," given to Dall-E, when I was first using the image generator. 

CS Grads Face AI-Driven Unemployment

I have told my students, ever since early 2023, "add value to AI content if you want a job." It seems that recent Computer-Science grads have found this out the hard way. Companies are hiring far fewer entry-level coders as AI takes on that task.

 A story in the New York Times today reports on the troubles faced by this cadre of coders; some of them interviewed had applied for thousands of jobs, without a single bite. One story ended well: a young woman who had been rebuffed again and again for coding jobs found one in sales for a tech firm, probably because of her communication skills honed as a TikTok influencer.

The numbers for these students are depressing:  

"Among college graduates ages 22 to 27, computer science and computer engineering majors are facing some of the highest unemployment rates, 6.1 percent and 7.5 percent respectively, according to a report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York."

I don't know that others are doing much better, though I was encouraged to see that History majors have an unemployment rate of 3%. My recent students contact me for letters of reference and they are taking part-time teaching jobs, going to Law School, planning to work abroad. The job market is rather grim for them, something I experienced for very different reasons in 1983, when I moved back in with my parents, took two part-time jobs paying minimum wage, and I waited for times to improve. Friends went to the Peace Corps, the military, or grad school. 

What is different now? On the positive side, these young people know how to build professional networks (and have technology for that I'd could not have imagined). They get internships, something unheard-of except for Engineering and Business majors at Virginia in the early 1980s. On the negative side? They have been groomed from birth to get into the right school, then promised a six-figure salary. I see that among the Business-school students I teach too. I fear they too will face a round of rejections, and soon, as AI continues to evolve and companies deploy it for jobs once thought secure from automation.

Those interviewed by the Times note how rejections can come in minutes by email; AI scans the thousands of applications for AI-related skills. None? Instant round-file for that application. I got that treatment too from firms where I naively thought I might be of service as a tech writer. With a flimsy one-page resume that consisted of grocery-story work primarily, I got snubbed.

My Humanist side says "welcome to the club" of under-employed but bright people. My my humane side says "you worked hard yet you have been replaced by a machine." The answers are elusive, because as the story notes, universities are slow to implement AI-coding into their CS curricula, the one area where some new grads find work. And to be honest, that's simply the result of an industry that caught so many of us flat-footed two and a half years ago. It takes years to change a curriculum. 

I fear all those Accounting and Finance majors are next on the chopping block, as companies scale up their AI efforts.

So what do I tell my students this term? Learn to be flexible? Hone those value-adding human skills? Get ready to have side-gigs? Volunteer? Build a robust professional network? I suppose that may work...for now. I'll know more when I begin to use ChatGPT 5 soon. I fear it may be the creative genie that takes away even more jobs.

This moment marks where their and my experiences differ. When I graduated, the Federal government was not axing hundreds of thousands of jobs and no software was replacing entry-level workers wholesale. We had inflation then, but the country was run by a competent, avuncular President and sane and independent Congress. No more.

Before going to Europe for a year in 1985 and after so many rejection letters, though an aunt's contacts I managed to land a professional-writing job for the parole division of Virginia's Department of Corrections. It was soul-draining work, but it paid well. I picked up a volunteer gig tutoring ESL to Cambodian and Vietnamese refugees; that ESL experience helped me land a teaching gig in Madrid. Then grad school, then...where I am now.

Keep at it, graduates. 

Creative-Commons image: Wallpaperflare.com 

A Bleak Future For Peer Tutoring in Writing?

 

Even before retirement from full-time teaching, I had concerns about how the concurrent emergence of AI and a neoliberal generation of senior administrators demanding "data-driven" programs and assistance might harm the autonomy of writing centers.

We are no longer lore-driven, but our work focuses first and always on human interaction rather than measurable results, work that proceeds from 50 years of scholarship and practice. What will ubiquitous AI mean for us?

We can see from the chart above, reflecting my Spring 2025 survey responses from students, that 3/4 admit to using AI for writing work. Though the survey was anonymous, I suspect the percentage to be far higher. To paraphrase what several students said in textual responses, "we are all using it, no matter what professors say." In Summer 2024, I attended sessions at the European Writing Center Association where directors reported declines in usage at their centers, as students turned more to AI for just-in-time assistance during hours when centers are closed.

I've called elsewhere for writing-center staff and administrators to be leaders as AI advances, so folks who do not teach but presume to lead universities do not tell us how to do our work. At stake? What I call a "Dark Warehouse" university on the Amazon model: much human labor replaced by technology, delivering a measurable product when and how consumers want. It's not a bad model for dog food or a cell-phone case, but it's terrible for the sort of human-to-human contact that has built the modern writing center.

I need more data from my and other schools to make any big claims, but I will focus on the AI's role in this possible and disturbing future, with some data from my student surveys of the past three years.

We had a smaller number of respondents this year than in the past (in 2023, n= 112, in 2024, n=74 , this year n= 47). Without a cohort of Writing Consultants and teaching fewer students myself, my reach was shorter, and I relied upon notices via our campus e-list. Faculty may not have sent out the survey either; many (too many) still ignore AI and others seem disinterested in knowing what students are doing. I have no empirical evidence for these claims, but my gut reaction and stories from other campuses lend support to my hunch.

Here is another chart from the current data from Spring, 2025, for the 3/4 of respondents who used AI in some manner for writing:

 

Some of the "create a draft" labels get cut off, but here are the options:

• Create a draft I would submit for a grade: 1 respondent (3%)
• Create a draft I would not submit but use to get ideas for structuring my draft: 11 respondents (33.3%)
• Create a draft I would not submit but use to get ideas for vocabulary or style: 8 respondents (24.2%)
• Create a draft I would not submit but use to incorporate sources better: 6 respondents (18.2%)

The range of uses from the chart maps well onto the tasks done by writing centers, except we don't write anything for clients, beyond modeling a sentence or two. We ask questions of writers, which some systems such as Anthropic Claude began to do as recently as Spring 2025.

 

Interactivity in natural language, with the first metacognitive questions from AI, raises a question or three, involving how AI might replace human tutors especially in the wee hours or at the busiest times of the semester. I've found assessment of drafts (with the right prompts!) can be as good as the feedback I give as a human.

 

Ironically on my campus, we've made seeing humans more onerous. As institutions like mine want to measure everything, there's an irony: students may simply seek commercial AI instead of campus services. My institution set up a rather onerous system for students to set up meetings. The intentions were good (track students' progress and needs) but undergrads are simply not organized enough, in my experience, to heed the details needed to book meetings. Many exist in a haze of anxiety, dopamine fixes from phones, and procrastination. ChatGPT asks for nothing except a login using their existing credentials.

 

The notion of walk-in appointments, which had been the rule when I directed the center, remains for us at Richmond, but students get pushed to the new system and need to register even during a walk-in. This added level of bureaucracy confused and daunted many who stopped by, during my final semester of full-time work, when I worked one shift weekly myself as a writing consultant.

 

I argued against adding more complexity to our system, in vain. The collected data on writers seemed sacred. We had to count them, to count everything. My counterpoint? You want students to come? Just let the kids walk in and help them; the human helper does the bean-counting later. AI, on the other hand, invisibly counts those beans for its corporate owners (and trains itself). It serves needs at 3am and in a heartbeat. One need not leave one's chair to get assistance that, as my students have found in my classes, steadily improves by the semester.

 

Instead of wrestling over social-justice concerns in our journals, we might focus our limited time on how to avoid becoming amateur statisticians for Administration. We might concentrate our energies on how we get students to come to us, not AI, when they are stuck or panicking. 

 

I have no clear advice here, except: make a tutorial with a human as seamless as with AI. That goal seems more important to me than all the arguing about students' rights to their own voices, since AI tends to reduce prose to a voiceless homogeneity. Getting students to see human tutors offsets some of the environmental and labor consequences of AI, too. If students see humans more, their carbon footprints are smaller and those tutors stay employed. 

 

Get them in our doors and, yes, employ AI ethically for refining work already done, to add voice and nuance, to remove falsehoods dreamed up by machines, and say something exciting. I'm pessimistic that our bean-counting, non-teaching leaders of many colleges will heed my advice. The Dark Warehouse seems more at hand than when I published my article early in 2023.