by Justice William W. Bedsworth

Greetings from Sky Harbor International Airport. That’s Phoenix, Arizona. I’ve been sitting in this airport for four hours. And you thought your day was going badly.

In three more hours, they HOPE to have a plane to take me somewhere else. I now HOPE to get to my destination at midnight instead of 5:00 pm. After that, I HOPE to pick up my rental car and drive an hour-and-a-half to my pillow.¹

In short, not my best day.

And it’s taken a large bite out of my confidence in twenty-first century technology. No, wait, that’s not quite right. I still have a high regard for the technology.² What I’m not sure about is the ability of humans to handle it.

I mean, this is not quantum physics. We’re not talking about a complicated piece of nano-technology involving gene-splicing and CRISPR deployment.

What’s laid me low today is our inability to harness the internal combustion engine (which Daimler and Maybach developed 140 years ago) and flight (Orville and Wilbur, 1903).

If we’re still botching our use of these technologies, what kinda odds do you want to give me on our chances to tame AI before we blow ourselves up?

You wanna know where we are with AI? I asked a search engine how long it takes food to reach the colon. Here’s the answer I got:

Food typically takes about 24 to 72 hours to reach the large intestine after being consumed, depending on various factors like the type of food and individual digestion rates. If you’re asking about snow and babies, it’s important to ensure that babies are kept warm and safe in snowy conditions, as they can be sensitive to cold temperatures.

Apparently the machines think it’s a good idea to defrost your children before you eat them.

The internet has already gone a long ways toward destroying our culture and turning us into warring tribes of savages. Now artificial intelligence is preparing cooking instructions for baby cordon bleu.

I think I’ve seen this movie. It doesn’t end well.

Nor will my day. Nineteenth and early-twentieth century technology has defeated them. But equally distressing was the fact my airline was unable to leave the ground in Orange County without explaining the proper usage of the technology they do understand.

The highlight of this was an audio-visual explanation of how to inflate our lifejackets in case of a water landing. There were three actors in this little playlet, standing in the aisle, being considerably less animated than a high-school version of Waiting for Godot performed by mimes with a voiceover.

In fairness, their material wasn’t great. DeNiro and Streep couldn’t have done much with these lines. I mean, they’re talking about a “water landing.”

We’re flying from Orange County to Phoenix, for crying out loud. If we need to make a water landing, we’ve got much bigger problems than inflating our lifejackets.

And let’s not overlook the fact the phrase “water landing” is a contradiction in terms. If we’re putting down in water it’s not a LANDing. If there were land available, we’d be putting down in it. But there isn’t. So we’re talking about an emergency WATERing.³

That’s not just a semantic difference. That’s not just what the sheriff in Cool Hand Luke called “a failure to communicate.” That’s a complete disconnect in our ability to trust each other. That’s like the surgeon who’s supposed to re-construct your knee asking you how you feel about your upcoming amputation.

So, having established the failure of my airline⁴ to grasp basic principles of English composition, let’s deal with the geographical and historical ignorance displayed here. Has there ever, in the history of airline travel, been a water landing between Orange County and Phoenix?

Come on, folks, the only way we’re going down in water is if we have AI for a pilot or we get hijacked. Now those are two possibilities I’d appreciate help with. If they had people standing in the aisle offering advice for those situations, I’d be interested in hearing it.

Certainly much more interested than I am in the second act of this production: instructions on how to fasten my seat belt.

Folks, we’re twenty-five years into the 21st century. Seatbelts have been a daily part of our lives since they became mandatory in cars in 1968. Unless you’ve been in a coma for sixty years, you can pass the quiz on seatbelt connection. Who can there be who still needs instruction in this?

Are there people defending their automobile seatbelt tickets on the basis the technology is too advanced, and they couldn’t figure it out? Should “Click it or Ticket” include a third option “Or Take a Class to Learn How”? Last time I looked, this was not a part of the traffic school curriculum.

I get this way when I get cranky. So let’s try to be “fair and balanced.”⁵ Let’s look at the positive side of today’s adventure.

Yes, the airline *did* get me here. Having lured me out of my bed before the sun left its own bed, having agreed to ferry me across the country, they dropped me instead in the middle of the Great American Desert.⁶

And under the terms of our contract, here is not where they promised to take me. The deal was for a trip to Buffalo. There’s a failure of consideration here that I will be discussing with an airline rep or two.

Or six. Or however many it takes. I’m ready to meet with the entire board of directors, an English teacher, and an historian if they can answer some of my questions.

You don’t wanna mess with retired people. We have time to drill down on lengthy discussions.

I, for example, have at least another three hours in Phoenix.

BEDS NOTES

1. Emily Dickinson said, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in your soul.” My thing with feathers started this day as a parakeet and is now a pillow.
2. I’m an English major, for crying out loud, any technology more complicated than a doorknob is a mystery to me.
3. Which sounds like something you accomplish in your backyard on a dry day but is nonetheless highly preferable to related terms like “submerging” and “drowning.” “Watering” may be misleading but at least it doesn’t suggest that the people 200 of us have entrusted our lives to are unclear on how solid their landing choice should be.
4. Or the FAA, which probably prescribes this warning.
5. A phrase I only use sarcastically.
6. The temperature is 91 right now, and I’m dressed for a nighttime arrival in Buffalo. I moved away from the window an hour ago.

William W. Bedsworth was an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal until his retirement in October 2024. He's written this column for over forty years, largely just to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2019 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). His last book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, can be obtained through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at heybeds@outlook.com.