Fire and Ice

On Labor Day weekend here in the U.S. there will be more than a few cookouts. People with perfectly adequate indoor kitchens, no doubt with electricity and, taking the electricity a step further, microwaves, and the magnetic fields of an induction range, will go outside and light a fire to cook with. Friends and family will gather. Food will be simple and simply prepared. Some people will have an expensive outdoor grill. We’ll have a simple metal bowl mounted on a tripod and filled with charcoal. Both of them will cook with actual fire. There will be tables and chairs for eating outside, usually simple outdoor games to encourage playful interactions among a range of ages and skills. Of course there will be spectators and friendly kibitzers. Households with large refrigerator-freezers will have chests of beverages sitting in ice.

Fire and ice. We all have advanced technologies for heating, lighting, cooling. New England, where I live, had a winter industry of cutting blocks of ice out of frozen ponds and lakes, packing the ice in straw or sawdust for summer cooling, and for shipping it around the world for those unfortunate enough not to experience freezing themselves. What happened to those jobs?

It was at a family cookout many decades ago, that 16-month old me, wandered off from my grandparents’ back yard and down the street. I often heard the story of my encounter with Mike the cop walking our neighborhood beat, who recognized me and brought me back. Another day, off-duty Mike may have been in that backyard, lifting a cold one, and enjoying a burger.

Two weeks ago, my wife, Susan, and I were at another communal event at a major league baseball park. The college I attended decades ago had a meet up for alumni at a weekend game. Outdoors, hard seats, an old-fashioned game in a facility pretty much how it looked a century ago, and recognizable from fifty years earlier, when my grandfather took me and the cousins to a game. The crowd was cheerful and spirited. We engaged strangers on a slim mutual connection.

We all had fiber optic cable to our houses. We had high-speed internet, and subscriptions to programming. All of it AI supported. We all had the latest devices in our pockets, humming with AI.

What was the use? Once again, we were there for the humans.

We were all on our best behavior. Nothing automatic about that.