Sunday, November 5, 2023
I had to get my driver’s license renewed recently; apparently, because I was turning 76 years old, the bureaucracy of the State of California believed that my knowledge of the driving laws needed to be tested. With Steve Lopez’s column about the process in mind, I studied the handbook thoroughly, only to end up taking the DMV’s eLearning course test instead and working my way through it with only one wrong answer.
After my new license arrived yesterday, I immediately checked the expiration date: my current trajectory has me still teaching at CSU Long Beach in 2028, so it looks like Professor Mohr’s knowledge of speed limits will once again be subjected to the scrutiny of the DMV on-line testing system in the not too distant future. By then, I hope to be teaching only in the spring semester, so I should have plenty of time to review the handbook and get prepared for the zig-zag of trick questions.
In the meantime, I wonder if there’s any chance that my next new license might not feature an image that should be accompanied by a trigger warning. It’s not a new image. I just checked my old license and the iconic gold prospector image associated with California is featured on that one, too.
Say, what?
I know that people are tired of “political correctness,” but I am going to speak up anyway. What does the recitation of “land acknowledgements” mean if the State of California can brazenly subject its residents to a reminder of a period in which the indigenous people of California were murdered and robbed of their land? How does the State of California have the nerve to subject the handful of descendants of that genocide to carrying around a legal document that valorizes that iniquity?
This is an outrage. Now I realize that other, infinitely more egregious outrages are being committed right now, and that the invasion of Ukraine has caused enough sorrow there to need a thousand years to subside; and that the invasion of Gaza by Israel, as retaliation for the mass slaughter of women and children in early October, will only perpetuate the cycle of vindictive justice. Deliberating killing non-combatants, which Israel knows full well it is doing, is a war crime no different from what Hamas has done. A cease-fire is long overdue, as are the murder trials of extremist settlers who believe that they can murder Arabs in cold blood with impunity. The unlikelihood of anyone, whether they be Hamas leadership and its rank and file executioners or the marauding network of those in Israel who believe in perpetual expansion, being brought to judicial reckoning is almost certainly 100 percent. The non-existence of any succor in this situation is almost more than I can allow myself to acknowledge in any degree. The punitive rage of both sides seems more interested in targeting those who want the shared consciousness of all human beings to be the first priority, and I can only hope that my profile is low enough not to warrant some variant of a fatwa or imposition of a demand to resign my job.
With that said, let us consider how the image of the prospector on the California driver’s license shows the sifting pan in his hands to be tilted directly alongside the image of the driver’s head. This image is in the “background” of the license, but it suggests exactly what is happening with AI. Our minds are being mined for knowledge, and the gold of social control is being stored in the vaults of a coded cloud. If this is not yet officially delineated by the legal allies of Silicon Valley in the California state legislature, then it is only a matter of time before it comes to pass. The image on the driver’s license is merely a proleptic meme.
About Bill Mohr