An Argument about Teaching, Technology, and Being a Tool-Using (and Tool-Consuming) Species

[Cross-posted to Front Porch Republic]

Joel Mathis, a fellow Kansas writer and friend, recently reflected on joining what may be something of an anti-AI bandwagon, and what it may mean for him professionally. Those who know me know that I’ve been on the bandwagon for a while (I don’t continue to use a flip-phone and occasionally wear a t-shirt celebrating the Butlerian Jihad—“Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind”—from the Dune legendarium for nothing.) As a teacher, I’ve converted most of my essay-writing assignments into in-class Blue Book journaling assignments (which, of course, had never truly disappeared) over the past two years, and I’m mostly happy with that change. But with the start of the fall semester, with many of my fellow academics sharing their thoughts about how, or to what degree, their lessons plans are (or are not) incorporating the incredible advances in artificial intelligence, I figured I ought to think through and put down my position about it all as well. Thus, the following long statement, which I included at the end of all my course syllabi this year.

 A Manifesto on AI

In this course, you are strongly urged, and assignments are designed to require you, to avoid ALL use of generative AI tools (that is, those which generate usable images, summaries, or written statements in response to prompts) insofar as your reading and writings assignments are concerned. Let me explain why.  

Your education here at Friends is likely made possible by, and guided by, several things: parental support and expectations, athletic or artistic or academic scholarships, social pressure, personal or religious motivations, and more. I would like to add one more element to the mix: the ideal of humanitas. It is because I, as the instructor for this class, take this ideal seriously–and I want you to take it seriously too–that I am imposing the rules regarding AI mentioned above.

The term humanitas goes back to ancient notions about education, focusing on how a person can become a responsible, virtuous, independent human being. It is the origin of the word “humanities,” which includes history, literature, philosophy, language, and what are sometimes referred to as “the liberal arts.” Over the millennia, the notion of humanitas has been revived and re-interpreted many times. In this class, the ideal stands behind what is taught in the sense that I believe that one of the core elements of being a responsible, virtuous, independent human being is understanding the nature of, and the operations of, our shared civic life. Gaining that understanding, however, will be undermined if you make use of AI tools to avoid the assigned reading, or to avoid the struggle of communicating what you have learned from your reading in written assignments, because the kind of understanding relevant to both the liberty and the liberality of the humanities in a practical and a practiced one.

Reading AI-generated summaries of the assigned reading is therefore NOT an acceptable way to prepare for class or to engage the class material. This class isn’t about providing you with information to regurgitate. It’s about getting you to closely read and wrestle with hard questions asked by the text: questions that have challenged people for thousands of years, and questions that are (or ought to be) central both to how you conduct your private life and to how we organize civic life. Relying on an auto-generated summary of a text inevitably leads one to miss out on details of the thought processes that led the author to put their conclusion the way they did, and thus to miss the opportunity to think alongside the author’s arguments and to critically interrogate them. 

Using generative AI tools to create all or part of your writing assignments is also, therefore, NOT an acceptable to way to demonstrate your engagement with the class material. Class writing assignments are not busy work. They are there to force you, through the labor of choosing words and connecting sentences, to figure out not only how to communicate the understanding that you have come to of whatever author or problem you have been asked to study, but also exactly what your understanding of that author or problem actually is. A civic environment of responsible, virtuous, and independent people will be one filled with inevitable disagreement and discovery; developing the skill of communicating, through writing, one’s own understandings is essential to being able to both engage with disagreements and learn from others’ (and one’s own) discoveries.

AI tools are obviously of enormous benefit in all sorts of practical fields, and learning how to make use of them in certain research contexts may well be vitally important to your professional future. Just academically speaking, while using AI tools to answer specific research questions, build research bibliographies, or check research citations has some real limitations, developing the skills necessary to do so will likely soon be as routine an expectation as knowing how to use Google Docs or Word. But for this semester, in this class, you are invited, as unusual as it may sound, to take the ancient ideal of humanitas to heart. Here, you will be expected to wrestle with terms and concepts, and to learn to discuss them and write about them, without too much reliance upon powerful technologies which can do, seemingly more quickly or comprehensively, things which you already have—or already have the need to develop—the ability to do. I hope you will embrace this expectation and gain from it.

A Debate over Being Human

Michael Austin, an old friend of mine and another academic, currently the provost at Snow College in Ephraim, Utah, shared a very contrary perspective in a two-part essay of his, humorously subtitled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Skynet and Love ChatGPT.” It starts with him confessing that, though an “Enlightenment humanist” at heart, someone whose most important work of scholarship presumes a worldview into which AI probably has no place at all, he had, as a university provost, “a professional responsibility to implement both classroom AI policies and curricular guidelines.” And so he, being the brilliant pragmatist I’ve always known him to be, dove into the latest pedagogical literature, and figured out a way to integrate AI tools into the teaching of the liberal arts, a way that he found both personally fulfilling and filled with intellectual potential. As he concluded his essay:

When AI extends our ability to do things that were previously beyond our reach, it also requires us to acquire new competencies to turn those possibilities into finished work. When teachers understand this, and when students grasp what they can actually accomplish with the help of AI models, classroom assignments can become a gateway to releasing human potential, unlocking knowledge locked away by limitations AI can help us overcome.

As a longtime writing teacher, I am quite sure that AI will be the end of the thesis-driven five-paragraph essay assignment. I do not mourn its loss. Five-paragraph essays do not occur in the wild, and thesis statements were never anything more than rhetorical training wheels. Teachers who still give such assignments deserve the AI-generated drivel they will almost certainly receive.

But look what we can now put in its place. How about a final assignment to write a full-length opera or a symphony, or a history of a nearby town? With AI, freshman English students might create a graphic-novel version of Moby-Dick or Great Expectations. Or how about a full video version of The Iliad or Dante’s Inferno? AI can help students do things like this.

I don’t begrudge my friend’s enthusiasm (AI enabled him to achieve his long-abandoned goal of being a political cartoonist, after all). And like him, when it comes to teaching essay writing, I also don’t feel the need to mourn any particular pedagogical form, or really any particular teaching instrument. But unlike him, I look at the idea of giving my students—especially beginning ones—AI-dependent assignments and incentives in the name of encouraging them to produce whole histories or symphonies, or create whole videos or graphic novels, as an approach that misses the very foundation of a liberal arts education.

At its heart an education in the human arts and sciences involves, I think, a very present, very embodied, very non-automated engagement with art, ideas, and the written word. To fail to go through an educational formation characterized by such interpersonality is to be diagnosed by a doctor who never actually sees or speaks with you, or to eat a meal prepared by people who never actually handled the dough, the meat, or the vegetables. Obviously, such formational or educational—or diagnostic or nutritional—processes are not entirely all or nothing, entirely black or white. As a college professor, I’ve long since made my grudging peace with (though thankfully I’m still mostly available to avoid) distance and online learning as an unfortunately necessary compromise, thanks to the undeniable good of increasing access on the one hand and dealing with the challenge of affordability on the other. Similarly, we’ve all found ways to accommodate speaking to a nurse on the phone or cooking with canned food from a grocery store. Still, when you talking about as important an ideal as humanitas, I think the reflections and warnings of such thinkers as diverse as Amy Gutmann (who presented education as involving participatory social reproduction) or Michael Polanyi (who presented education as depending upon tacit exchanges between the teacher and student) or John Dewey (who presented education as a “continuing reconstruction of experience”), or Martin Heidegger (who presented a “real or genuine education” as reflexively engaging students in those practices and understandings wherein they already dwell) need to be taken to heart. Whatever compromises the rival goods of our heavily technologized world require of us, AI-enabled steps away from carefully helping students construct and make responsible, virtuous, and independent use of those cognitive and cultural competencies already present in their lives would be, I think, a failure of teaching.

Michael and I ended up going back and forth about this issue at some length. Initially our dispute focused on the issues of scale—it is one thing, he correctly observed, to restrict the use of AI tools in a particular classroom in the name of maintaining an environment of closed and close instruction, something that may be, depending on the circumstances and the pedagogical aims of the teacher, perhaps even admirable. (Michael, to his great credit, has regularly taught classes at Central Utah Correctional Facility—a prison, in other words—and admits that the controlled reading and discussions possible in such environments allow for some superb educational outcomes). But one professor’s preferences, he insisted to me, can’t speak to the needs of an entire institution, especially one dealing with state mandates in regards to the integration of AI into teaching practices. I don’t disagree with any of that; as I emphasized in my manifesto, I was speaking to my students solely about “this semester, in this class.” I freely admit that I am developing this argument solely with my own particular instructional stewardship in mind.

But before long our argument had become one of fundamental assumptions about what it means to become an educated human being. Michael took the position that, since human beings are, evolutionarily speaking, essentially tool-making animals, to make the project of education one that requires, in the name of some humane ideal, the exclusion of whatever tools happen to be part of the world we and our students actually inhabit is actually “profoundly anti-humanistic.” My position was, to say the least, quite different.

I agree that human beings are, evolutionarily speaking, tool-making and tool-using entities. But why does it therefore follow that attempting to construct a learning environment that explicitly rejects the employment of any particular set of contemporary tools which humans have invented is unhuman? That would imply that any construction of the human—and, I would say, of the humanitas ideal as well—has to be solely centered on the evolutionary process itself. But that is simply not the case. Human beings are tool-using animals, yes, but they are also dialogic, discerning, distinguishing, debating animals. The whole history of human civilization may not be reactionary and Luddite in character, but throughout the history of human civilization there have nonetheless been innumerable instances of resistance to, reconsiderations about, and reform of our tools and the processes that have been or are being constructed through and with them. Sometimes we construct forms of intercourse and learning and development that are consciously, even aggressively, progressive in that they seek to transcend the forms that came before. But sometimes we also construct forms of intercourse and learning and development that purposefully embrace what are understood (sometimes, I would argue, correctly) as the accomplishments and virtues of previous forms and therefore strives to preserve them.

For example, I doubt anyone who lives in the wake of the Enlightenment can believe that the restrictive Chinese imperial examination system was the peak of human educational development—I sure don't. But by the same token, it’s not as though those 1000+ years (which gave the world Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms, the poetry of Li Bai, and the development of Neo-Confucianism) were all "anti-humanistic.” So while I am happy to acknowledge the validity of many of the criticisms of the pedagogical choices I and others are making, to so firmly stipulate the evolutionary and cognitive centrality of relying upon tools so as to label the decision to reject AI as a learning tool (and thus the decision to pedagogically control its role within the classroom) as therefore anti-human goes, I think, several steps too far. It is as much a humane reality to seek new tools for engaging with art, ideas, and the written word, as it is to decide that some tools inherently disrupt the practices necessary to understanding, and to therefore avoid them.

Tools and Technology, Within and Without

I’m comfortable with the position that I’ve taken—which, it’s worth noting, is completely independent of perhaps even more immediate environmental and ethical and apocalyptic arguments against the normalization of AI in schools (and our lives generally). But Michael wasn’t wrong to push me very specifically about tools and their place in education—or indeed, just developing the competencies that I would consider essential to the project of humanitas in the first place. Plato attacked writing, after all, as a tool that would disrupt the memorization and orality he understand as essential to learning. Would I attack wearing eyeglasses because they are a hack, a short-cut, an augmented engagement with art, ideas, and the written word?

I think it’s possible to come up with a distinction between AI and eyeglasses that doesn’t just depend upon the later having been present and in ordinary use throughout human societies for a millennium, while machine-learning models, the core of artificial intelligence, are—depending on your definition—less than 50 years old. Among other things, I believe one can rigorously defend the construal of this distinction as being between a tool that the individual uses to do a thing the person has learned how to do (using eyeglasses in order to better see the paper or the screen upon which one is drawing or using software to construct comic strip panels) and a tool that the individual uses to do a thing that the individual has explained to the tool how to do for them (explaining to ChatGPT, perhaps through an admittedly demanding and potentially engaging and creative learning process, exactly how do draw or construct comic strip panels). But this distinction, like any distinction made in reference to human processes of educational development, will likely always have to be subject to regular reconsideration. As, for example, I’ve reconsidered—if not entirely changed my mind about—GLP-1s.

Listening to a discussion about GLP-1s (Ozempic, etc.) conducted by Ezra Klein a few months ago is what put me on the path of n at least partial reconsideration of these even-newer-than-AI technologies, pharmaceuticals that control appetite and otherwise “hack” certain receptors in our brain. Originally, I was profoundly critical of these drugs; I was deeply, philosophically, hung up on the idea that there is something essential to our ability to think and reason and feel as human beings that cannot be extricated from our spatially and socially embodied experiences. Consequently, I was just plain suspicious of technological interventions into our embodiment for the sake of exercising some kind of control over it, partly because such "control" seems to me an attempt to actually escape the labor of our embodiment, to instead statically align it with some given set of utilitarian advantages or procedural expectations or economic demands or cultural preferences rather than anything actually ongoing and human. Nearly two decades ago I pontificated about this, comparing using marijuana to elective cosmetic surgery, the former positively and the latter negatively. At the time a friend of mine pushed back against that framing, using nearly the exact same eyeglasses example—would that tool be a "technological intervention"?—that Michael used on me. I thought I could make that distinction at the time, and I still think I can make it today—but the surety of that distinction is not beyond ongoing debate.

Another friend of mine, Damon Linker, a fine writer who has struggled with some health concerns, recently reflected on his doctor-recommended use of this miraculous new technology, specifically Wegovy, which has helped him lose 55 pounds:

I learned to think about the world using categories of moral analysis descending from the traditions of classical philosophy and Christian theology. To speak very roughly, both view obesity as following from gluttony, which the first describes as a vice and the second describes as a sin. . . . To avoid the vice of gluttony one must practice and demonstrate the virtue of fortitude or steadfastness, which involves an act of self-mastery, the overcoming of one’s craving for the pleasure of eating for the sake of both the intrinsic psychological rewards of self-mastery and the consequential good of bodily health.

Looked at in these terms, my failure to lose more weight on my own, even after I learned about the threat my obesity posed to my cardiovascular health, was a defect. I was incapable of mastering my craving for the pleasure of eating. This is quite common, especially in our time and place, with its abundance of hyper-palatable and unhealthy processed foods. . . .

That’s where the Wegovy comes in. Suddenly a portion that would have left me craving more food left me feeling fully satisfied and not at all tempted by the thought of eating more. In fact, the thought of eating more made me feel vaguely ill. Which is just another way of saying that the drug removed my craving for more food—the very thing that needs to be overcome and mastered in order to resist the vice of gluttony.

This means that a world in which everyone who’s overweight or obese has access to a GLP-1 will also be a world in which this kind of self-mastery and self-overcoming no longer need to be cultivated. Is that a bad thing? I suspect it is. . . .

Those are the troubling thoughts that have come racing into my head these past few months when I’ve glanced, smiling, at my noticeably smaller self in the mirror.

Damon’s experience sat alongside Klein’s and the provocative discussion he had conducted about the human body and brain, about how the best way to understand GLP-1s is to see them in terms of a tool that intervenes in our own evolved programming, in my mind for weeks. It is undeniably the case that our industrialized and financialized agricultural and food production systems have ended up creating environments which are profoundly unhealthy for our bodies, and profoundly difficult for our evolved mental scripts to deal with. And when we think about that problem in a world characterized by questions about artificial intelligence, questions that force us to struggle with what we think we know about consciousness, about genetic inheritances, about our own ability to make decisions which distinguish ourselves from the tools we make, use, and bring into our lives, I’m just not sure we can avoid—or at least, I’m not sure I can avoid—acknowledging that we may not have a good grasp of what “self-mastery” today actually means. I am confident that I can distinguish between eyeglasses as a tool that enables individuals to seek mastery in tasks that they do and AI as a tool that enables individuals to seek mastery in getting a computer to do tasks for them. But am I just as confident that GLP-1s are a tool to avoid constructing virtues that we should be bodily striving to master? Might they instead be tools that enable individuals to pursue a mastery over the multitude of ordinary virtuous tasks that our gluttony-enabling and incentivizing world would interfere with? I’m not sure I’m convinced, but I genuinely wonder.

Stumbling Forward Technologically

The easy, and avoidable, rejoinder to this kind of meandering quasi-Luddism is pointing out that I wrote it on a computer (one of which, so far as I know, Wendell Berry still doesn’t own). I use a laptop, my wife and youngest daughter regularly use an e-bike, and I don’t go anywhere without my blood pressure medication and my Excedrin. I appreciate my arguments with my friends over technology, because being reminded of my own existence as a tool-using creature is a good thing. Among other things, it indirectly emphasizes to my thinking that my own creatureliness, and the humane and tactile work I hope to do in an embodied way in the classroom, is itself mediated by the intervening and augmenting technological tools that I unthinkingly (zuhandenheit, if we prefer Heidegger’s term) use every day. And this recognition leads to humility, some of which I hopefully express humorously.

For example, this semester I have embraced as a supplement in all my classes a new version of Turnitin, the ubiquitous plagiarism-spotting electronic paper submission system, called Turnitin Clarity. The idea behind this supplement is that I can, by requiring students to use this as their word-processing program for essays and response papers, police any AI use they might engage in (and distribute consequences accordingly). By letting them know all about this beforehand, my hope is that they’ll be incentivized to accept the ideals I’ve put in my Manifesto and avoid making use of any generative AI in their work. What will be the outcome of this restriction? I don’t know, but I’m anxious to see. The idea of using a technological innovation to stand in the way of another technological innovation may seem counterintuitive, and certainly in some cases it would be so (that’s where the in-class Blue Book assignments come in!). But as the new semester begins, I’m happy to attempt to make my way through all these challenges which stand in the way of achieving some kind of humanitas as best I can. What else can we do except continue to engage, assess, and re-assess as necessary? After all, wasn’t it the temptation to make use of tools that would allow us to skip over, even for seemingly excellent reasons, all this constant (yet constructive) work of technological (re)consideration which got us here in the first place?

13, 15, 20, and 33

On August 13^th, Melissa and I had been married for 33 years. And as of today, August 15^th, I’ve officially been employed at Friends University for 20 years (as the accopanying notification, given me this week, declares). Despite my occasional obsession with actuarial tables, I’m not a numerologist, and I have no idea how I might discover some mystical significance from those two dates and two anniversaries. But they seem to combine in my mind in ways important to me, nonetheless.

This has been a summer of challenges for me, health-wise (and since we’re talking about healthcare in America, money-wise too). It’s made me reflect rather intensely (probably too intensely, as both my wife and my cardiologist have frequently reminded me) on what I’ve accomplished and what I may yet accomplish—as a teacher, scholar, writer, citizen, father, husband, and human being—in however many years or decades I have left. Melissa and I have had plenty of ups and downs over the years, but I really do believe the ups, especially over the past few years, have outnumbered the downs. We’ve also been blessed when it comes to our four daughters—they all seem to genuinely like each other, and actually spend with and support and root for each another as they all, with varying degrees of success (though none have yet run up against any actually insurmountable obstacles; another blessing) navigate adult life. Mostly, whatever the financial struggles we over-educated, artsy, politically-radical-yet-culturally-bourgeois, suburban denizens of the (to steal from John Cleese) lower-upper-middle-class are facing, I think we’ve navigated past the worst of them, and things really will, probably, continue to get better (relatively speaking, of course).

As for my work as a college professor, I was lucky enough to find a job at a small liberal arts college that, while hardly a Swarthmore or a Pomona, seems situated well enough and lead wisely enough to be able to weather the demographic and administrative challenges facing it. As one of my colleagues said without a trace of irony at our recent faulty retreat, we folks teaching at Friends University are genuinely lucky people. Assuming I keep up my part of the bargain, and adapt as necessary to continue to teach those students whom arrive at this institution and want (or are required, as we faculty in our not-remotely-infinite judgment decide) to gain at least a little civic knowledge, to learn at least a little bit about the history and nature and functions of America’s political ideas and institutions, then I think that luck will hold out, and I’ll be able to do good work here for another decade or more. I have some ideas about pivoting, in the years to come, the major I’m in charge of—History & Politics— in the direction of something that more directly incorporates my long efforts to teach sustainability with what it means to participate responsibly in civic life; maybe those ideas will bear fruit, or maybe not. Either way, I can’t think of a better place to try.

As for being a Wichitan and a Kansan for two decades, I can’t separate that from my hopes to actually put my 20 years of observations together into a book, which is the whole point of my “Wichita and the Mittelpolitan” project, after all. (I note, upon linking to that introductory comment, that I’ve passed the then-years-in-the-future date which I stuck to it, so as to keep it at the top of the Substack. Obviously I must have figured out a way to maintain that even as the calendar has rolled on to 2026 and beyond. Good for me!) Sometime last summer, it occurred to me that framing my thoughts about mid-sized cities around a history of the past 20 years of Wichita as I have observed it might really work as a book. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that incorporating other first-person observations, through interviewing people that I’ve gotten to know over the past two decades and who can share thoughts about this city and its politics, its music, its businesses, its culture, its art and artists, its partisan contests, its demographic changes (or lack thereof), its government, its religion, its bureaucratic infighting, its natural and agricultural environment, and much more, would be even better.

I am, in the end, a political theorist, someone who wants to think through things on a level which exists between fundamental philosophy and motivating ideologies; I still believe in the insight I had 13 years ago, that Wichita doesn’t fit the dominant urban metropolitan model, but neither does it fit the rural micropolitan one either, and I think that there can be a theoretical language which can inform and provide insight to the way all the disparate topics above operate in the Air Capital of the World, right here in Kansas. I’ve gone back through many of the thousands of words I’ve written which touches on this insight in one way or another over the years, and started to organize them; maybe, in the final third of whatever amount of time I will, in the end, have enjoyed on this planet—years that will almost certainly be spent in this frustrating, struggling, but also (to me anyway) always delighting mid-sized city—I’ll finally be able to find the time and discipline to put together my (and others’) thoughts about it all.

Well, that’s about it. And wow, I kept all this navel-gazing under 1000 words. Pretty good for me! Maybe all that time writing Insight Kansas columns has paid off.

We Were Never Spacemen (But Glen Definitely Comes Closer Than Me)*

I met Glen Henshaw 39 years ago, in the late summer of 1987, presumably in one of the hallways on the 4^th floor of V-Hall in the old Deseret Towers student housing complex at Brigham Young University, where we had both moved in for our freshman year. I don’t have a memory of that first meeting, but I have a memory of him. He was thin, smart, funny, athletic, and with a background in nature and agriculture I could relate to (even though Virginia forests aren’t at all similar to Washington wheat fields). Above all though, he was a geek, and it was on that level we truly connected. Not that our geekeries were entirely similar; mine ran towards Dungeons & Dragons and comic books and super-hero movies and getting philosophical about all of the above, while his ran towards the technical side of science-fiction and fantasy: he was a born tinkerer, a student of taking stuff apart and putting it together again, and his obsessive questioning expressed itself differently than mine did. Thank goodness we had our mutual passion for Star Trek (including the novels and comic books, but particularly Star Trek: The Next Generation, which premiered that year, and which he and I and a few other fellow geeks would crowd around whatever television sets were available in the freshman dorms and watch together); who knows how our friendship would have developed otherwise.

But develop it did. We weren’t inseparable friends—he had his gang, staying up to ridiculous hours and hitting Radio Shacks and assorted warehouses around Utah Valley, searching for parts for a robot dog they were determined to build, whereas my gang was mostly just a bunch of politically and culturally malcontented scribblers—but we hung out together pretty often, doing the Blues Brothers thing as the mood struck us. When Ray Bradbury came to campus to give a guest lecture, he and his gang staked out seats close to the stage; they kindly let me squeeze in beside them, and it turned out to be one of my fondest memories of that whole year. But whereas what I got out of it was a great story, Glen got a mission. As he wrote to me:

I remember Bradbury's talk. I remember sitting there with you and Aric and Rob and loving it. But I only remember one thing Bradbury said during that talk, which if I recall correctly was actually an answer to a question posed to him during the Q&A afterwards. What I remember him being asked had something to do with space exploration and poverty and tax money and its wise use. His answer was "I believe we have a spiritual obligation to explore the universe. It is yours if you have the head and the heart for it." That talk, and indeed that statement, gave me the courage to give up my current plans, to start treating college as merely my day job, to ignore most of what my professors suggested as a career path for me, and to start dreaming bigger than I had to that point.

Glen’s dreaming has continued for decades, through a proselytizing mission for our church (I’ve whined and wondered about mine a lot, but Glen’s was way worse: he served a Mormon mission in Salt Lake City, for heaven’s sake), through graduate school, through marriage and children, through moves and family transformations and challenges political and religious and economic. The home and the life which he and those whom he loves have managed to build together is really quite beautiful, rooted in a rural sensibility he’s carried with him throughout his life (his wife and he, among other things, raise Katahdin sheep on a farm in Maryland). But most relevant to this post, he has, for decades, commuted regularly from his farm into Washington DC, where he works as a roboticist for the Naval Research Laboratory—he is, in fact, now “Senior Scientist for Robotics and Autonomous Systems” at the NRL, as well as the lead roboticist for the Robotic Servicing of Geosynchronous Satellites project. In that position, he has won awards and fought bureaucratic battles (not always winning those); he’s helped build upon his experience decades earlier to develop our understanding of robot dogs and, through them, how the programming and machine learning and motion of robotic limbs might be made to work in outer space. The result, after twenty years of work, is an RSGS robot capable of approaching, grasping onto, and repairing satellites while they are in orbit—an accomplishment whose implications, for those tasked with counting costs and determining parameters of space operations in the deep bowels of America’s scientific-industrial complex, are massive. As Glen put it:

Currently, industry designs satellites to be completely reliable, with zero room for error or unexpected failure, over their entire lifespan. Think of it like a car. If you had to build a vehicle to drive 1 million miles without a single breakdown, it would cost an astronomical fortune. But we don’t do that because we can easily take our cars to a mechanic. Because that safety net exists, our vehicles don’t need to be over-engineered to last forever. Satellites are so expensive because they lack that safety net; they must be built to survive that grueling “1-million-mile” journey alone. But if we had a mechanic in space, we could build satellites much more affordably, without the need for such extreme, hyper-exquisite engineering.

That robot will be launched into orbit later today (weather permitting) on as a Northrop Grumman MRV-MEP mission. You can watch the livestream here, if you’re so inclined; I definitely will be. Glen is in Florida for the launch, as he should be: while he won’t be going into space, years of thought and sweat and technological experimentation and budgetary infighting and just plain old hope that came out of him will be. No one involved in America’s various space programs over the decades ever truly believes that anything is ever done alone; even the most arrogant flyboys and test pilots of America’s earliest efforts in the 1950s and 1960s knew that their accomplishments depended more upon the programmers and number-crunchers and engineers on the ground than anything they could do in the air or in outerspace; indeed, that’s why most of them, over time, became more the latter than the former. I look at my old friend; he’s not a military hotshot, but a man skilled with all things terrestrial and digital as well as celestial, someone who has taken those skills and put them to, well, spiritual work. For me, science-fiction at its best (and Star Trek only rarely was, but its occasional best was some of the greatest science-fiction ever, or so Glen and I would both agree) is exactly that kind of work; as I once wrote, it is “human-science-meets-the-infinite, I-put-on-my-space-suit-and-plug-in-my-time-machine-and-touch-the-face-of-God.” Glen won’t be doing the touching this afternoon, but something he touched, inside and out, for years and years, will…and that’s more than enough reason for me to sing his praises here. As the man at the end The Right Stuff says, go Glen—go!

*The title of this short essay is a reference to the wonderful podcast by Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk—of Firefly fame, most obviously—which my wife Melissa and I listen to pretty obsessively. Our appreciation of Nathan and Alan has everything to do with their comedy and their charisma, and nothing whatsoever to do with their science-fiction chops—which frankly, despite frequent involvement with that genre, they have none to speak of. This is, as I’m hardly alone in discovering, not at all uncommon amongst those performers and artists and directors who bring writing about space, time, and all that technology and exploration has opened up to us to the screen (though William Shatner’s thoughts about going into space are worth listening to, again and again—which is something that old geeks from the 1980s that Glen and I do, and happily so).