The soft and the hard

There is a lot of gnashing of teeth and rending of hair these days about the automation of everything, the idea that computers will eventually do everything and there will be no work in the future. So there will be lots of lower-skilled people sitting around un- or under-employed because their jobs have been automated away. Hogwash. It's hard to imagine that there could ever be a shortage of work, because humans can't get along.

Yes, grocery-bagging or legal due diligence may disappear as jobs, but there is so much work that needs to be done to bring people into alignment, to get them to understand and empathize with one another. Particularly when there are perceived resource shortages and Malthusian macronarratives are peddled to draw in eager eyeballs.

Somewhere in my education I decided that I didn't need to study hard sciences because, in my mind, nature (photosynthesis, gravity etc.) worked fine, so why did I need to worry my pretty little head about them. Society was different. It needed work. In the intervening years, there have been many occasions when I've regretted this choice, as STEM curricula have been apotheosized around the world.

But in essence I think I was right. The best example of this is climate change. The hard science of it is pretty much settled. There's very little doubt that the world is undergoing human-driven climate change which threatens our survival. The planet itself, of course, will be just fine, and could give a flying fuck about us, to say nothing of the universe, which doesn't even know we are here.

But the soft science of climate change? Mama mia! It is factionalized beyond belief. Rich countries vs. poor countries. Right vs. left. The chattering class desires/needs to display wealth through travel, but this competes with our internal understanding -- and we must understand this, right? -- that flying burns a lot of carbon and is really bad. It would be interesting to go to airports and count the number of hybrids, EVs, and plug-in hybrids in the parking lots. So much conflict, so much contradiction, both between and within us.

Yet social science has progressed immensely too. We see it in the race of the big tech companies to aggregate ever more data about us to create models of who we are, in Cambridge Analytica's successful use of that data to help Trump win (which is really just an instance of the leveraging of big data), in China's implementation of a panoptical state in Xinjiang using facial recognition software and every other tool in their arsenal to control dissidents. The soft sciences are getting ever more scientific. We must figure out what we would like to use them for.

And we must cultivate the soft arts and, perhaps, the hard arts, whatever they may be.