In the very early hours of April 28, 2014, Markus Kaarma stepped through the front door of his sprawling suburban home to investigate the sounds of someone rummaging through his garage. He wore a baggy cotton t-shirt and flannel pajama pants, and after listening for a moment to the sounds inside, fired a 12-guage shotgun through the door four times. When the ringing in his ears finally stopped, 17 year-old Diren Dede lay dead on the concrete floor.
In the court proceedings that followed, jurors were presented with two images of the man with gun: was he a new father, concerned about an increasingly bold series of burglaries, and well within his rights to defend his home and family? Or had he laid a trap, with an open door, motion sensors, and surveillance cameras, and waited to “shoot some fucking kids,” as he described to a hair stylist earlier that day?
The jury was left to measure his actions against those of a reasonable person.
Of course there is no such “reasonable person” to ask how he or she might have behaved (although that would make things much easier). Instead the reasonable person is meant to represent a decent, boring, law-abiding person of average intelligence and no latent misanthropy. It is meant to be the average feeling of the culture today.
As the trial churned through its due process in pursuit of a verdict the court of public opinion was somewhat more swift, and a reasonable person was hard to come by. The case polarized Kaarma’s and Dede’s community. It was quite clear to every observer that a crime occurred that night, but the people were divided on whether the criminal was a murderer or a burglar. No single reasonable narrative emerged, but rather parallel reasonable extremes that each laid claim to common sense.
This comes at a time when our leadership has more or less embraced the premise that we, humanity, are not reasonable at all. And by leadership of course I do not mean this administration, or congress, or anyone like that. I mean the technology industry, who, for better or worse, are the most influential actors actually looking forward and who are making every effort to engineer discretion out of our daily lives.
Our shopping preferences are cataloged and optimized so that we barely need to look for the things we cannot live without. Self-driving cars promise to take human error out of driving and finally make our roads and highways safe (except for when pedestrians wander into traffic). Diplomacy and disaster response is now reduced to a series of game theory simulations and logic models.
Amazon, Google, Tesla, Apple, have (not incorrectly, necessarily) concluded that the “reasonable person” is a fable. That what humanity needs is to outsource the decision making to a tool that is even capable of making an informed decision.
Now, as we grapple with the reality that the notion of truth is a point of contention, and they, those guys over there, are simply pawns of a corrupt elite, it can be hard to argue that Bezos and Musk are necessarily wrong.
Consider looking across a courtroom to a jury of your peers and seeing nine people who thought that The Big Bang Theory was a good show. Or that you could be exonerated by DNA evidence if only those peers of yours respected scientific consensus. Or that some of the people on that jury do not see you as their peer, but as something somewhat less, an outsider, an interloper, who is, perhaps, undeserving of the laws that keep them, the citizens of the jury, safe.
To look across that courtroom you would not be wrong to wonder if the reasonable person against which that jury will measure your actions is very reasonable at all. And if a reasonable man simply evaluates facts in an impartial way, isn’t that really only a problem of logic? And isn’t that what computers are for? It seems almost that machines really are better suited to arbitrate our high crimes and misdemeanors than a peer who can’t even spot fake news.
But a computer cannot think, for now. Its underpinnings are in the goals and assumptions of the engineer, and I hope that we can agree that Jeff Bezos is not a picture of a reasonable man. And so we’re left to sit and watch them all go red faced screaming through their daily lives, and mourn the loss of reason.
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