The Washerwomen of Lockerbie Demonstrated the Things People Do Better Than AI
12/31/24 – – One safe prognostication for 2025 is that artificial intelligence (AI) will continue to shape our lives, especially in the workplace. No less a soothsayer than Elon Musk envisions a future when all jobs will be “optional.” At a tech conference earlier this year he predicted: “AI and the robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”
Listening to Musk and others who tout the potential of AI to exceed human capabilities, I keep thinking of lyrics from the Broadway musical “Annie Get Your Gun”:
Anything you can do I can do better.
I can do anything better than you.
That’s scary. And if it’s true, what will be left for humans to do in tomorrow’s brave new world?
An answer to that question came to me just before Christmas when I read a LinkedIn post by a fellow graduate of Syracuse University. Derek Wallace shared a moving story I had never heard before related to the aftermath of Pan Am Flight 103, the airliner that was blown out of the sky on December 21, 1988, by a terrorist’s bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland.
Among the 259 passengers who lost their lives were 35 Syracuse students returning to the U.S. from their studies abroad for the holiday break. On the ground 31,000 feet below in Lockerbie, 11 people were killed and 15 homes were destroyed by falling wreckage.
The debris field in and around Lockerbie encompassed 845 square miles, much of it rough terrain. After 12 months of searching, more than 16,000 personal items were recovered and, miraculously, nearly all returned to the families of the deceased. And here, from Syracuse University’s “We Remember Them: The Legacy of Pan Am Flight 103” archives, is where the story gives us hope for the super powers of humanity:
“The contamination sustained by many of the items — from weather and aviation fuel among other causes — meant many, notably textiles, were initially identified as unreturnable. Upon learning this, residents of Lockerbie took on the task of cleaning and returning the items to the families themselves. The Lockardians who performed this selfless act have come to be known as the Washerwomen of Lockerbie.”
The empathy and kindness of these unsung angels will never be captured in an algorithm. AI will never duplicate the joy and inner peace experienced by the families of Syracuse students whose belongings were lovingly laundered, folded and returned to them by the Washerwomen of Lockerbie.
There’s plenty that we can and must do better than AI; the important stuff that makes us human.
Read Derek Wallace’s LinkedIn post and you’ll feel much better about the future when you say goodbye to 2024 with your best rendition of Auld Lang Syne – a Scottish verse – this evening.
Here’s to a happy, crisis-free New Year!
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