It is a cheesy question, but it resonates with me.
What keeps you up at night?
Like everyone else, I worry about my family and friends, what I did not get done on any given day, where my car keys might be, the dog who needs walking as does the owner, and all sorts of mundane but nevertheless real concerns.
I also worry about the really big problems staring all of us in the face from all over the world.
The horror that befell Nepal along its border with Tibet, bringing a stunning but unknowable death toll, is almost impossible to process. It is also almost impossible not to blame ourselves for ignoring climate change. Who could have ever envisioned walls of rushing water and mud bearing down on human beings at speeds between 70 and 120 miles an hour? Science may well find ways to mitigate rising temperatures and expanding seas, but we and those who come behind us will likely never experience our world the way it was before we of the 20th and 21st centuries heated it through fossil fuel use, clearing forests thousands of years old, industrial farming and livestock practices, and large-scale water consumption.
AI keeps me tossing and turning as well.
I use AI. It answers my questions on all sorts of topics, both serious and frivolous, and even wrote a Christmas story for my grandchildren with family members as characters, including the dog. But I, and I suspect millions of my fellow Americans, simply do not know what we do not know about AI, and that is profoundly dangerous. Think drones that hunt down other drones, and drones that choose their own targets. Is a drone that shoots to kill as morally accountable as a human being who does so? Is it moral for a parent supporting a family to lose employment to AI which has no family and no heart? How about the robot who won a race against human champions but who did not have enough “sense” to stop before it crashed into a wall? Will AI, like most other world-altering changes, be a force for good or for evil or for both?
And then, of course, there is the toxic and vicious political climate that is tearing—or has already torn—our nation apart. Millions of us no longer think of “us” as one country but as various collections of “us” and “them.” We now practice “never the twain shall meet,” much less talk civilly with each other. It is as if, in our 250th anniversary year, we have discovered the Biblical “tower of babel” where we hear other people’s voices but have no clue what they are talking about. Our national allies since World War II are no longer our close friends and may be edging toward adversaries as the whole world rearranges itself in part because of our almost incomprehensible political situation, leaving some Americans bereft and some who could not care less.
Do I have solutions for all that faces us? Are there solutions to all that face us, and, if so, are we willing to do the hard work that is necessary and which requires us to look beyond ourselves, our own experiences and opinions?
You and I do not have the solutions, and neither do the candidates who will be on our ballots in less than 60 days, no matter what they have said on the campaign trail.
The only course is to vote for the candidates who recognize and care about these issues, the ones who are willing to confront them, and who will address what ails us with clarity and courage.
We have learned the hard way that elections have consequences.