Beware the Double Swinging Door

Have you ever marveled at the smoothness of a busy, well-run restaurant?  How the servers are continuously “running,” with meals coming and bussed dishes going – all through ONE door!    Crazy that there aren’t routine collisions – but the secret is in the double hinged swinging door, one door opening in and one door opening out, and the edict “stay to the right!”   Genius in its simple elegance.

I’m taken by the metaphor of the double hinged swinging door and its application in life and in nature.  I just attended the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas and the conference was abuzz with Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning, ushering in a new era of automation and robotics, AI supported journalism, healthcare, etc.  Whole industries are in jeopardy – take truck drivers.  www.census.gov indicates that more than 3.5 million people work as truck drivers, an occupation dominated by men who hold  more than 90% of truck driving jobs.  Wired.com, in their article, Robo Truckers and the AI-Fueled Future of Transport adds:

Trucking is often thought to be one of the first industries at substantial risk. The work is difficult, unsafe, and often deadly and high rates of driver turnover are a constant problem in the industry. As a result, autonomous trucks have become a site of tremendous technical innovation and investment—and some forecasters project that truck driving will be one of the first major industries to be targeted by AI-driven automation.

A game changer no doubt, and as things go, some will benefit and some will suffer.   The question for you and for me, will you be positively or negatively affected by the double swinging door of Artificial Intelligence?

The Grand Tetons, jagged mountains rising from pristine lakes, are a wonderful example of nature’s double hinged swinging door.  www.nps.gov adds, The Teton Range towers over the valley of Jackson Hole, providing dramatic alpine scenery and drawing millions of visitors to Grand Teton National Park each year. Over billions of years, natural forces including earthquakes, glaciers and erosion have shaped this magnificent landscape.

The Teton Range uplifts one earthquake at a time along the 40-mile long Teton fault, a north-south trending crack in the earth's crust. As the region stretches in an east-west direction, this stress builds to a breaking point and generates an earthquake, lifting the mountain block skyward while dropping the valley floor. On average, the fault moves about 10 feet in each earthquake: two to three feet up and four to six feet down. In the 10 million years since the fault began moving, the total offset is probably over 25,000 feet. As a quick estimate, the Flathead sandstone on top of Mount Moran is 6,000 feet above the valley and that same layer is buried roughly 20,000 feet below the valley floor on the east side of the fault.

Picture it, during a seismic disruption, the Tetons rise 2-3 feet and Jackson Hole drops 4-6 feet!  Now that is a crazy double hinged swinging door!