Doctor Bot Ed

This post is a patchwork of tattered reflections on a slew of topics ranging from humans behaving like robots to robots behaving like humans, mind-reading technologies, maybe cyborgs and so forth. There is no grand thesis tucked away in a prose that finds low triviality and high seriousness equally endearing. The hope here is that the reader, if any, would walk away feeling enough esprit to want to grab somebody gently and engage in debate until the Holy Spirit returns our souls to the still waters. “Be Still and know that I am God,” as the Psalmist writes, is a better consolation for our times where the relationship between work and worth is truly turbulent.

So let us fasten our reluctant bungee cords and free fall over the falls and the cascade into the hazy mist over flipped palisades and feel the frightening vista of our noses kissing the foam and still realize that there is hope beyond the dip, the cliff and nosedive, for the rebound will takes us back to higher ground.  Five, four, three, two, one . . . jump!

Once we get past the cringe factor, the queasiness and impious murmurs of the belly, the notion of a Robot as academic administrator is going to bat far fewer human eyelids than a Robot as teacher. Since statistical spreadsheets and mind-­numbing diction are the voices and oracles of our time, all the pious pabulum spewing from the literature on inspirational leadership sounds doubly hollow as technocrats enact their fantasies and nostrums on rostrums prized a mile higher than men.  Courage and spirit are vanquished with the vapor and wind. Not all men and women, to borrow a sentiment from C. S. Lewis are withered “without chests.”  Like hapless projectiles approaching the event horizon in a shimmering black hole of bureaucratic gravity and gravitas, their numbers are shrinking faster than the sheared follicles from a bald man’s lustrous pate. Once in a while, the residue from the remnant and the bumbling, maladjusted few offer principled resistance and are thus recompensed with brevity of span and reproached as irredeemable spam in the carousel and annals of institutional memory.  Recalcitrance against this sole bleeding, soul searing conditioning and contest as elite hurdlers over the blades and barricades of red tape or against comporting the extended trot like an Andalusian horse in the exact art of exquisite dressage is a fancy that the system and sprocket wheel cannot brook.

Once workers were the chamberlains of craftsmanship; now they are less than simpering solders in the circuit board of careerism. Medieval craftsmen at times deliberately infused their works with a subtle asymmetry as a way of recognizing their imperfection in the face of a perfect God.  A better version of this sentiment can be found in John Ruskin’s magisterial essay ‘The Nature of the Gothic.’  This ‘asymmetry’ allows for extraordinary variance in creative expression.  If humor can be found in homonyms, a careerist learns the rules of the guild for gild and then leaves the guild with repressed guilt once the falling foliage of time has spoken.   What the Bard writes about King John’s second coronation and the utter superfluity of it all, might equally apply to the ‘enskyed’ and ‘sainted’ gatekeepers of higher education who burden our souls with their prose and purses.

Therefore, to be possess’d with double pomp, To guard a title that was rich before,

To gild refined gold, to paint the lily, To throw a perfume on the violet,

To smooth the ice, or add another hue

Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light

To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish

Is wasteful and ridiculous excess (King John) [Read more…] about Random Notes on Doctor Bot Ed