Airports, Wheelchairs, and Cheese Rolling Down Hills

essay

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Last night, in SeaTac Airport, I stepped off my plane and walked toward baggage claim. On my way, I saw that a group of people, almost entirely men, had gathered at a wine bar to watch the last few minutes of the National Football League playoff game between the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs. I’m not a football fan but I’ll watch any televised competitive endeavor. I even like to watch British people chase wheels of cheese down steep hills.

As Buffalo was advancing down the field in an ultimately unsuccessful effort to win the game, I heard a Siri/Alexa-ish voice say, “Please step aside.”

I looked back to see a woman in a motorized wheelchair—a talking chair. It kept saying, “Object in way. Please step aside.” A few football fans noticed that they were blocking the path so they alerted other fans and they clumsily made space. But the wheelchair still didn’t move. The woman repeatedly pressed a touchscreen but the machine just kept making the same request: “Object in way. Please step aside.” The fans further honored the request and completely got out of the way. They crowded into the wine bar and emptied one half of the concourse.

But the machine still would not move. I wondered if the woman was using the chair’s tech to speak

“Hi,” I said. “Can I help?”

With her own voice, the woman said, “It won’t go.”

I asked, “Is it your chair?”

“No,” she said. “I was supposed to have an escort but they asked me if I wanted to try this chair instead.”

Ah, I thought, we all get entranced by new technology. I have very limited knowledge of such things but I thought of how advancing technology has improved the lives of disabled people. And, because I had been watching a football game, I remembered those paralympians who use high-tech prosthetics to compete. O, those amazing athletes sprinting on aerodynamic blades!

But I didn’t want to offend the woman with my quick thoughts and assumptions. So I just said, “I’m clueless about machines.”

She said, “I’m gonna miss my flight.”

I thought about asking permission to pick her up and carry her to the gate. But I knew that would be crossing far too many boundaries. And, with my bad back, age, intermittent exercise, and weak left ankle, I was no longer strong enough to have pulled off that feat anyway.

I didn’t know what to say or do. Frankly speaking, I grew even more scared of offending her. I wondered how terrible that I might look on a video posted to YouTube. We live in a time when people’s lives are destroyed for offenses large, medium, and small. We’re forced to live defensively.

But she rescued me by saying, “I can walk a little. Can you help me up, please?”

She took my hands and I helped her stand.

“It’s my knees," she said. “I’ve had a lot of surgeries on both.”

“What gate is your flight?” I asked.

“C-18,” she said.

“That’s not too far,” I said. “Do you think you can do it?”

“I have to make my flight,” she said.

I looked around for help. But nobody was paying attention to us. The bystander effect plus NFL football. I’m mad at myself for not asking for assistance. I think I was caught in my own sort of bystander effect. I wondered if I should find somebody official to help us but I knew that any bureaucratic service would certainly arrive too late.

“Okay,” I said. “Give me your weight.”

She leaned against me.

“Can I wrap my arm around you?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said.

So I wrapped my left arm around her shoulders and, with both hands, she held tightly to my right arm.

“Are you ready?" I asked.

“My bag,” she said.

I was very happy when another man picked up her suitcase and said, “I’ll follow.”

So the three of us slowly made our way to her gate. We helped her to a seat near the boarding gate.

The woman profusely thanked us. The other man bowed his head, placed a hand over his heart, and walked away.

“I’m going to tell a gate agent,” I said.

Then I approached a woman in official clothing, pointed at the woman that I’d helped and said, “She had one of those self-driving wheelchairs that stopped working. She’s gonna need help getting onto the plane.”

“Are you flying together?” the agent asked.

“No,” I said. “I don’t know her. I was just helping her.”

“Good for you,” the agent said. “We’ll handle it.”

I looked across the way at the woman that I’d helped. I hadn’t asked for her name. She hadn’t asked for mine. I waved, pointed at the gate agent, and gave the OK sign. She waved back.

Then I made my way to baggage claim. As I walked, I grew increasingly angry. What would we have done if that woman’s disability had made it impossible for her to walk? And then I wondered why those high-tech wheelchairs were even in the airport. I walked by several airport workers pushing passengers in typical wheelchairs. Yeah, I thought, another example of tech assholes trying to replace humans.

I walked past that wheelchair still sitting idle and useless and took the photograph that you see above. And that expensive contraption again said, “Object in way. Please step aside.”

I flipped a middle finger at that damn machine.

But then I wondered if these self-guided wheelchairs, when working, would be a valuable gift for disabled people. Maybe those chairs were revolutionary. I wondered if I even had the right to be angry on behalf of disabled people.

And then I remembered a scene from the HBO series, Silicon Valley, centered around a $14,000 refrigerator. I remembered that the most cynical character used a word to describe that fridge—a word that described the effort to use technology to solve a problem that didn’t exist. But I couldn’t remember the word. I was frustrated. It seemed hypocritical to use my phone’s search engine to find a word that castigated a certain type of technological excess.

But, finally, while waiting for the rental car shuttle, I gave up and found that specific scene.

And here it is, profane and funny:

Yeah, the word is solutionism.

I then searched for various definitions of the word and found this quote:

“Recasting all complex social situations either as neatly defined problems with definite, computable solutions or as transparent and self-evident processes that can be easily optimized—if only the right algorithms are in place!—this quest is likely to have unexpected consequences that could eventually cause more damage than the problems they seek to address.”
― Evgeny Morozov, To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism

I then realized that I wasn’t angry at the self-driving wheelchair itself. I’m angry at the philosophies—the theologies!—that lead us down these dangerous cultural and political paths. I think of the tech archbishops who own and operate Amazon, Apple, Tesla, and Meta. These men might have more power over us than any plutocrat ever.

As I’ve said and written elsewhere, I’m not afraid of artifical intelligence. I’m afraid of the people who kneel at the altar of artificial intelligence.

And, yes, I’m highly aware that I’m typing this essay on an iPad for a newsletter system that only exists online.

But, after I arrived home last night, I picked up the book that I’d been reading.

Conor Niland’s memoir is about the political, economic, and cultural ways and means of professional tennis. But it’s also about one person’s obsessive effort to become one of the top tennis players in the world.

It’s about the human body.

And I’m reading a tangible book—a hardcover made of real paper—about a tangible athlete.

I read the penultimate chapter last night and set the book down somewhere in the house. I couldn’t find the object itself but I did find the dust jacket.

And I think the word that I most love right now is dust.

I think how the dust in our house contains dead skin cells. Right now I’m breathing in parts of myself. I’m breathing in parts of my family.

I’m at the kitchen table as I finish this essay. I just reached across and asked my wife, Diane, to hold my hand.

“I gotta make this ending real,” I said.

She said, “He took my hand and wrote about our hands.”

And then we laughed together and I asked her if she’d ever watched British people chasing wheels of cheese down steep slopes.