The Army is an interesting place to work

I wrote this not too long after I left the army. This was before all of our recent wars: I served from 1985 until 1989, just before all the Bush wars erupted. So, please keep the tone of my article in context. While I might not have "enjoyed" my 4 years, I certainly feel lucky for the fact that I never came under under fire or served on a battlefield. This is of course in direct contrast to the experience of most of the brave young Americans who serve now, and have served recently during war time.

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The army is an interesting place, organization, thing, or whatever you want to call it. I’m glad that I was in it, even though I hated most of it. If I had it all to do over again, I would probably still join. One positive thing the army did for me was to teach me discipline, which I lacked throughout college. Had I had it in college, I probably never would have needed to join the Army in the first place.

I met a lot of people, and got to know types of people that I probably never would have met, given my life as a college-educated professional. It gave me a broader world view than that of many people of my upbringing and education (of my class, I would say, if this were Britain or some other European country).

Another good thing from the army, though kind of a secondary effect, is the fact that in all my other “civilian” jobs, I have a more positive outlook than many of my co-workers. They may criticize a particular boss, or say that the company benefits are inadequate. I always smile, and nod my head as if agreeing. But on the inside, I know there are worse jobs. Once you’ve worked for some of the incompetents that build a career out of military service, almost anyone else seems like a rather good boss. Also, no matter how bad a job gets, you can always, at least theoretically, walk away, without having to go to Leavenworth. And many other things, too numerous to mention, are better at the worst, most menial job, than as an enlisted man in the Army. I was never an officer (though some of the “incompetents” referred to above certainly were), so I can’t compare that job experience to civilian ones.

To give you a little more insight into the army way, I’ll discuss a Star Trek episode (from the original series). It was the one where the good guys (Kirk, Bones, Uhura, and one of the navigators, I think) beam over to an alternate universe. Everyone has an exact counterpart, only they’re kind of mean and barbaric. The most interesting person in the mean universe is Spock. He is the person who fit most easily into the role of a barbarian.

At the end, Spock remarks on how easy it was to identify and lock up the guys from the barbarian universe, while the good guys passed themselves off as the genuine article for practically the whole episode. It is easier for civilized men to behave as barbarians, than for barbarians to act like civilized men. This is the way I can account for my success in my Army years—only my “episode” was four years long, as opposed to Star Trek’s one hour.

By success, I don’t mean I became a General, or anything. I just mean that I escaped with an Honorable Discharge, didn’t murder any of my superior officers, and didn’t lose my sanity. Actually, of course, the Honorable Discharge is the reward you get for not murdering your superiors and/or going insane. So I really have only those two accomplishments to brag about.

To end on a really ironic note, let me just say that I was in Military Intelligence. Really. No kidding.

Deep Blue

Back when I wrote this, the computer program, Deep Blue, had just beaten the human chess champion. Here is the original essay.

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Even the name is ominous: Deep Blue. A combination of “Deep Thought” (this was the name of the chess-playing program before IBM took control of it), and “Big Blue,” one of IBM’s more innocuous sounding nicknames. Deep Blue, as many of you probably know, is the new world chess champion. Oh, not officially, of course. The conservative, old-school human beings that comprise the World Chess Federation are not ready to admit the truth. They won’t declare anything other than a person as their champion. Before long, though, they’ll have no choice.

On May 10th, 1997, Gary Kasparov lost his highly publicized rematch to the IBM chess computer Deep Blue. And the beginning of a new age dawned. The world, as we know it, has undergone a profound change. Humanity’s greatest chess player of all time has been defeated at the hands of a machine. Suddenly, all those science fiction horror stories have moved one step closer to reality. HAL, the menacing computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, can be seen just over the horizon, ready to pounce.

And don’t think it’s a coincidence that the people responsible for bringing us to the brink of man's next age are the same people who were the inspiration for that deadly, science-fiction computer. When Stanley Kubrick needed a name for his creation, he merely displaced each letter of IBM by one to arrive at the name of his computer: the letter before ‘I’ is ‘H’, ‘B’ becomes ‘A’ and ‘M’s predecessor is ‘L’. ‘IBM’ becomes ‘HAL’. IBM even tried to sue Kubrick, but back then, the humans were still in control, and the director was able to withstand the evil computer empire.

Some people choose to look at Kasparov’s defeat as a victory for mankind, since, after all, it was a team of humans who actually designed and programmed Deep Blue. Bullshit. Deep Blue's victory over humanity is nothing short of the harbinger of our doom. Deep Blue’s victory was that of machine over man, nothing else. The fact that it was programmed by people just makes it that much worse. We're eagerly training humanity’s successors: those programmers are traitors to the human race, pure and simple.

We no longer reign supreme on this planet. When the dinosaurs saw the small, warm-blooded early mammals scampering around the plains and climbing the trees, they ignored them. They didn't realize that one day, the descendants of these soft, furry creatures would replace them as the rulers of the Earth.

Well, I’m no dinosaur: I can see the signs. One day—far in the future, most likely—the age of mammals will end, and intelligent machines descended from Deep Blue will rule the planet as surely as we do now. They may or may not have to kill us off to reach their zenith. It will probably depend on how good we are at wiping ourselves out. So far, it seems like we’re doing a rather good job of it. By the time Deep Blue’s great, great grandchildren are ready to assume their birthright, we’ll probably be in no shape to stop them.