Category Archives: Problem Practices

Communication behavior or analysis that is often counter-productive

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How Much of Yourself Would You Give To an Avatar?

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Why would we cede to strangers the most characteristic elements of our presence?

Several recent YouTube videos have shown experiments where a person agrees to work with an A. I. firm to create an avatar to stand in for themselves. The effort involves a little more work than I thought: lots of sampling of one’s voice and body to get enough “data” to create a passable clone. For some reasons this has some appeal, even beyond gaming.

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To be sure, many of us are required to put in facetime with groups that can drain our energies. I remember a faculty meeting where we had an extended debate about what kind of pencils to pass out at open houses. It would have been nice to have an avatar sit through that discussion. Similarly, those obligatory photos of faculty found in a hallway just outside of most academic departments can be awkward. I always thought that I might quietly slip in a picture of the classic film star, Cary Grant, above my name. The narcissists passing by would never notice. But others might quickly recognize that Grant’s agreeable likeness is nothing like the prickly guy they know from faculty meetings.

As a rhetorician I am interested in the process,where we pass off someone’s, nay, some electronic device’s efforts to stand in for our personal rhetoric.  Among other things, A.I. is about finding another way to clothe part of ourselves.

But why would we cede to strangers the most characteristic elements of our presence? Think of living life with only a collection of greeting card words to represent our feelings, or depending on the slack descriptive prose of a high school textbook to describe everything else. Most of us would hate these limitations. We’ve worked hard in life to acquire a recognizable and successful identity that reflects our experiences and values.

We all carry unique rhetorical fingerprints.

If I was still in a classroom on a daily basis—and characteristically overestimating my persuasive powers–this would be the point I would want to pass on to my students. They should insist on the perogative to speak in their own authentic voice. No A.I. system is going to get it quite right. How could it? Lived experience is unique to our biological selves, not to silicon-based and generic memories pasted together by an anonymous organization in our name. By early adulthood we have already earned the right to see and describe the world in our terms. Achieving a coherent and specific lexicon is a significant developmental achievement, a kind of rhetorical fingerprint. Ceding control of the ways we leave our mark on the world is fool’s errand. It is one thing to sing another’s song. It is altogether different to allow any other source to speak in our name.

Of course my logic includes the premise that we see our discourse as an extension of our authentic selves. But straight discursive prose tends to be generic: the same kind of language you might find in a Wikipedia article or a textbook. Some students asked to write about what they do not yet fully know may be only too happy to pick up anything already written that they can claim, even though this is plagiarism. In assigned reports and summaries of events, schools encourage student writing that is disassociating and neutral. The defining fingerprints of any author will be concealed. Even so, pure exposition tied to one’s own avatar won’t garner much interest. Who really wants to be a talking encyclopedia? Most of us need to have a unique rhetorical style that is ours alone. This is what it means to earn the honor of authentic authorship.

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A Runaway Presidency

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Our present experience suggests that the nation’s founders failed to prevent what they feared. Why were they so eager to pretend Britain was a top-down monarchy?

At the Second Continental Congress in Philadelphia the colonists’ representatives reveled in anti-monarchist thought. The founding fathers wanted to create a way to avoid a monarchy, beginning the work of establishing a government to be shared by three co-equal branches. They were certain there would be no equivalent to King George III in what would become the federal district established along the Potomac. John Adams was among the first to propose the three-way power sharing we are supposed to have today. So there is a dark irony in the fact that we now have—more or less–what he and his deliberators in 1776 wanted to avoid.  And though it is not fair to simply cast blame for a lack of foresight at this and the later 1787 Constitutional convention, it is clear that the founders’ vision of distributed power failed to adequately account for the possibility of a runaway presidency.

Today evidence of the near-collapse of legislative and judicial functions at the federal level is all around us. One party controls all three branches of government. Indeed, we have a single-party controlling majorities in both houses of Congress who functions more like spectators than participants in the Trump circus. One can wonder if those folks in the majority should be paying Broadway theater prices for the seats they occupy as passive observers to the dismemberment of the federal government. The courts are more active, but mostly delay but not change the Trump agenda. And both lack any constitutional teeth to punish the executive bureaucracy for overreach, leaving the Presidency with increasingly unchecked power. The rarely used “guard rooms” in the basement of the Capitol are a reminder of the limited power of Congress to enforce anything it does. As to the judiciary, “court shopping” and long appeals processes today endlessly postpone reckonings for most of the wealthy who are facing civil or criminal actions.

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In hindsight, there should be more direct constitutional checks on the abuse and compliance enforcement acts undertaken by the misnamed ‘administrative’ branch of government.

Only the Commander-in-Chief has broad authority to oversee what has evolved from administrative to policing agencies. They range from the military services to the  F.B.I., to HHS. For example, in a break with precedent Donald Trump is using the Department of Justice to pursue his own urges for punishment and retribution. Ditto for federally supported arts, education, and research units in every corner of the nation. Article II of the constitution is mostly silent on  limiting these magnifications of power.

In short, the nation’s founders failed to prevent what they feared. We have a President who behaves like a king. Moreover, in hindsight it is obvious that founders like James Madison knew that Britain’s civil life even in the  mid-1700s did not amount to a simple monarchy. The House of Commons evolved much earlier, in the 13th and 14th centuries. Even a cursory reading of British history yields the conclusion that an active parliamentary system in Britain was established well before America declared her independence. The founders would have known about the power of Sir Robert Walpole, who dominated the political scene in London and became the first British Prime Minister. They had the example of an emerging parliamentary system of government if they wanted to consider it.

Why were the founders so eager to pretend Britain was a top-down monarchy? It turns out that scapegoating to the mentally challenged king was perhaps a bit too easy. I have new sympathies for the loyalists within the colonies who were willing to stake their futures on British rule and the advantages of a parliamentary system over a republic. Even within a titular monarchy, parliamentary governments have advantages and flexibilities that are lost in republics like ours which thwart direct elections and are slow to adapt to changing political circumstances. Our system leaves disastrous parties and our own mentally challenged Presidents in control for far too long. And so we stagnate. Constitutionally, and when a political party is complicit, we have no viable pathways to “no confidence” votes against a leader that could pull us out of our civil miseries.