The World and The Devil
I am a graduate student and employee at Rutgers University. When the World Cup came to New Jersey, the school paid for a billboard on I-95 reading, “Rutgers welcomes the world.” I for one want them not just to say it, but mean it and do it too. People on campus are fortunately well aware of the dangers immigrants currently face. We have had a petition to prohibit I.C.E. from coming to our campus for about a year now. There are people demonstrating almost weekly to make this happen, and local police are keeping tabs on such events. One of my colleagues is struggling with a visa application right now. There is presumably some sort of backlog. Perhaps with the impression that so many people are going to be deported anyhow, perhaps with the volume of federal employees laid off from their work, the State Department has become unable and unwilling to process the paperwork in a timely fashion. I actively dread the possibility of immigration enforcement taking away any of my classmates, colleagues, students, and professors. What happened to Wilber Perez in Dallas and Johan Guerrero in Biddeford can surely happen to anyone else.
The field of study I am involved in lies at the intersection of data science and public informatics. I inevitably have to learn about the role of A.I. in society. It is my personal wish that any technology should supplement and not threaten the human experience. But as time goes on, it becomes more challenging to find ways artificial intelligence is being used for good; medicine and agriculture are the main exceptions. So, to have a President of the United States suggest companies “self-police” while Sam Altman suggests “an accepting of the fact that some bad things are going to happen [not to him, of course] as society figures out the resilience” is a surefire way for a global catastrophe of some kind.
If we succeed in stopping MAGA during this midterm season, we can never let people forget how much worse things could have gotten. If we fail then, I would want to keep fighting, albeit with immense secondhand shame from those who functionally voted for Trump five times now.
—Joshua, 23