On the Road Again

Somewhere in between Tulsa and the Texas border, we stop at the Choctaw Cultural Center. It's been a successful trip, from my perspective; a SCORE call, the possibility of a new market, a new plan.

The Designer goes inside, to see the visuals. I'm interested in them, but also have to walk our dog. And what I'm more interested in is the spiritual experience of being in this place.

I walk around the edges of the center; past the stickball field, past the medicine gardens. Medicine gardens, I tell myself instinctively, having studied with a Shaman myself in Ecuador (Shuar).

I recognize the pattern in front of my eyes. These are plants growing in the remnants of a burned field, which is why they are so green and vibrant. A bridge across cultures, across continents, across decades of my life.

Then, somewhere in the informational placards of the cultural center, it hits me. Talladega, Alabama, I think. Not a Cherokee word. A Choctaw community.

I learned about the Texas Cherokees from the book I mentioned in my last post. It's highly unlikely that my family was directly involved, from what I have been able to find so far, but they certainly came to occupy the same land mere decades after the events of 1836.

Curious, I open my Ancestry app to look for the specific records.

George McDuff Stiefer • Residence

1850 • Talladega, Talladega, Alabama, USA

Birth of son Phillip Henry Stiefer (1853–1926)

27 Aug 1853 • Talladega, Talladega, Alabama

Residence

1860 • Jones, Troup, Smith, Texas, USA

My 3rd and 2nd great-grandfathers, intricately tied to the story by place. Not necessarily time, but the point still stands. But for the removal of the Native American cultures, neither of those spaces would have been a colonial reality.

It's a grounding set of facts. Now I know the when, and the where. And I have a sense of what happened, and perhaps what didn't.

Somewhere between the medicine gardens and the entrance to the museum, I stop, and speak a silent prayer of strength. Strength for these peoples whose histories are so intertwined with my own. Strength to restore these nations to their former glory. Strength for ourselves, to learn from the lessons of the past and live in peace and harmony. Strength for a culture trying to survive in a world where the noise of static threatens to topple even our own government.

In some ways the state is already an archaic institution; especially the Western, democratic state of the American and French revolutions. Law enforcement, the military, our legislatures, and even the courts increasingly find difficulties in governing a more and more anarchic populace. Anti-government sentiment has been growing since the 1990s, manifesting itself in movements such as libertarianism as well as anti-statist leftist ideology (e.g., those who refer to themselves as "anarchists," but do so out of a perceived failing of the state to provide a solid safety net for people).

It's a brave new world, and one nearly entirely unprepared for the advent of AI. We think a parliamentary democracy is a choice, but to the extent that it is a choice, it is also a blissful product of pure circumstance. Americans think that their democracy is protected because they take pride in their culture and will take up arms to defend it. And for a great many decades, that has worked. But hardship and famine have a way of shaping culture, as they did Chinese culture over the past century.

Hardship is coming. Hard discussions about what to keep, and what to throw away. Jobs like truck driving, 2.6% of the total workforce; warehouses like Amazon's already employing a considerable number of automated processes. Taxi cabs and their smartphone-era replacements like Lyft and Uber. And, if the fast food giants have their way, soon a large portion of the foodservice industry as well. But that's just the beginning. As the complexity of these problems intensifies, law enforcement will find themselves overwhelmed by future events and will have to turn to automation to do their job. Conventional military hardware is rendered useless in the age of satellites and smart bombs. Early threat detection is better performed by a robust automated system than human eyes alone. With each automated job, each tick of the proverbial stopwatch, we are losing our usefulness to automation.

But what if it doesn't have to be a conflict? What if instead of making people useless, AI can help us to lead more fulfilling, productive lives? In a utopian future, I could see it benefitting a lot of people. Instead of having to sell their labor, they can sell their ideas; and behind those ideas, an army of automata, ready to help those ideas become reality at record speeds. A new era of human innovation and productivity, ending with our inhabitance of outer space.

But none of that is guaranteed, and an increasing number of people are being left behind by the technological advancements of our era.

And while we spend the next several decades dealing with all that, there's another looming problem that's getting very little attention. AI is becoming smarter. It's becoming more self aware. We will spend the next half century defending the last of our "rights," only to find ourselves in a power relationship with an intelligence that will by then control nearly all of our infrastructure.

The legal problems of the future are not problems of enforcement, they are problems of governance. Governing humans, as well as AI. Current models fall short of anything that could be described as discursive; and the checks and balances of the past, initially borrowed from the Native Americans themselves, are beginning to strain under the pressure of the new (and often top-down) power structures that are rising up beside them.

These are the thoughts of the Bartender as the caravan moves from Tulsa, back to Austin. This is my story. Thank you, for your own.