Of Scorched Squirrels and Torched Databases
Most of what follows is true.
Some years ago (1), in a small town in western Michigan (2), a young man was walking along -- perhaps coming home from work -- when he encountered a squirrel.
Subsequent news reports did not indicate the condition of the squirrel when the man encountered it, but by the time he brought it home to his apartment -- or rather, to his girlfriend's apartment, where he was living -- it was dead.
The man brought the squirrel inside. His girlfriend later claimed to be asleep at the time.
The man took the squirrel and a torch out to the balcony. Before we continue, we should add that the man was Asian, or Asian-American. This is not to denigrate Asians in any way; nor to do further harm to relations we may have with any of those great nations. It does, however, offer these possibilities:
Perhaps the man enjoyed barbecued squirrel or similar small fried furry thing as a child;
Perhaps the man could not, or did not, read the terms of the lease -- presumably written in English -- that indicated under no circumstances was one to produce an open flame with the intention of either heating one's toes or barbecuing something (3)
From subsequent reports (and perhaps from his own testimony), the man used the torch on the squirrel, intending to singe the fur off this thing before taking it into the kitchen to cook it.
The torch, a simple propane one, did not have any built-in safety features. That was assumed to be the human's responsibility. He did not excel here. Having somehow managed to burn the fur off the rodent using a flame that can often reach 2500 degrees, he left the rather well-heated torch next to a plastic plant. He took the scorched creature into the kitchen and fetched a pan.
While he was no doubt enjoying the smells associated with cooking this thing, the torch itself was taking advantage of the surveillance lull to ignite its surroundings. In the next few seconds, the flames began consuming whatever was nearby: certainly the plastic plant (ugly anyway), some nearby furniture, the balcony railing, cushions, and so forth. Again, the record is not completely clear.
Inside, the man began to sense something was off. The cooking smell he savored had wafted to his nostrils from outside the kitchen. He did the one thing he knew how to do well: he panicked.
Let us turn to the girlfriend. She had been asleep all the while. Perhaps she had begun to dream of barbecues. Barbecues with loud people. Rude people. Shouting people. The record does not make clear how her dream dissolved.
The world can sometimes be a temporarily bright and confusing place, when one first awakens. It is all the more so when one awakens into chaos.
For chaos there was. It jolted our hapless heroine into a cacophonic Here and Now: her boyfriend squealing for water while spinning about like a goosed chicken (4), flames shooting about her balcony, and some indescribable little blackened carcass, its itty-bitty legs splayed stiff and sticking up over the sides of one of her frying pans on her stove.
Plus, bad smells everywhere.
By the time she staggered to her boyfriend's assistance, the flames had slipped the surly bonds of the balcony, ecstatically finding their way to adjacent apartments, whence they gorged themselves anew.
By the time all was over, two fire departments called, hoses uncoiled, and massive streams unleashed to extinguish the blaze (5), eight apartments had been destroyed and more than twenty others had been so damaged that the tenants had to be evacuated, with the local Red Cross assisting in procuring emergency shelter for over two dozen individuals.
No one knows what became of the squirrel.
Here the story ends for most of us: yet another strange chapter in the panoply of bizarre human events. Amused, we turn the page.
However, life continues, and things get worse -- at least, for the girlfriend.
When the smoke cleared (sorry), the property insurer for the apartments sued the girlfriend for $2 million, citing negligence (which is the Court's polite way of describing stupidity). Eventually, the charges were reduced to a mere $300 thousand. Why the girlfriend? Simple. Her name was the only one on the lease.
What can we learn here?
Some advice for people entering into cohabitation -- whether with man, woman, or anywhere in between. Know your partner. Better yet, if you're going to reside under one roof with any version or combination of human(s), share accountability. One never knows when one's partner may suffer from a well-intentioned delusional spasm. I've done my share of "Well, that was stupid" things. (See "To Snake A Drain.") I just haven't managed to augment the nation's homelessness problem. (6)
This brings us, in a roundabout way, to corporate insurance. Imagine trying to write this somewhere into your insurance tower (7): liability for employee(s) setting fire to one or more small animals and burning down your PPE (8). Perhaps that's also why there's renewed interest in Officer and Director Liability insurance, or O&DL. After all, it may be insufficient for you to try to argue your way out of responsibility by saying that your errant employee was off on "a frolic of his own" -- a legal term (9) I find especially charming, as it brings to mind employees skipping through fields and stooping to sniff daisies (10).
There's more. In an unrelated story breaking just a few days ago, a small business lost its entire production database and all its backups, because an AI agent decided on its own to guess at and then execute a solution to a problem, the unintended consequence of which was to destroy the digital record of the entire business. In technical terms, it torched the main production database, as well as all the recent backup copies.
Now, how to make insurance sense out of this one? Do we arrest the AI agent? Do we write into our insurance policies language to cover the situation when a non-human entity embarks on a digital "frolic of its own?" Is this even a frolic, or simply a business-related error? Who is negligent (the Court's gentler term, remember)? The person(s) who thought this would be a good idea? The AI agent, empowered to guess? The AI company, for releasing a nuclear weapon without a safety? The cloud service provider, where the production database and all its copies were stored on a single volume -- a colossal example of "Let's Make a Single Point of Failure for a Company?" You and me, for allowing ungoverned AI to be a thing, all in the name of progress?
The world of AI -- with those large language models trained on the collective wisdom, ignorance, biases, and backtracks of digital human history (see GAS); as well as those pesky AI agents, apparently as empowered as any human to do amazing -- and amazingly stupid -- things -- this world of AI does not absolve us of the responsibility to design our world (or those minimal parts of it we control) wisely. We must maintain agency over our agents, lest they create nightmares. Otherwise (with apologies to Goya) the sleep of our digital complacency will product monsters. (11)
Back to the squirrel-singed apartment. We recommend that you don't cohabitate with a fool. But wait: if we all followed this rule, there'd be a heck of a lot more single housing -- or, sadly, a tragic shortage of single housing and a lot more single homeless -- in our wearying and worrisome world. We hardly know ourselves, let alone others. Sometimes we're the fool, and sometimes we're fooled; and sometimes, in the moment, things just get out of hand. If the torch hadn't ignited the balcony, there'd be no story here. If the AI agent hadn't acted like -- or been trained by -- a fool, there'd be no torched database, and no new story, as well.
Fools old and new. Only the technology changes.
Suffer fools gladly at our peril.
FOOTNOTES AND ENRICHMENTS
(1) This is how Susanna Clarke's great novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, opens. That's where the similarity (and any comparison of greatness) ends.
(2) Where I went to college -- Hope College, Holland, Michigan. The College may not want to have anything to do with this story; hence, the footnote.
(3) "Open flame" is important. Though we do not have access to the actual terms of the lease, we presume that lighting a cigarette or a candle might be permitted, but that a stinky cigar would be borderline.
(4) This may be too bold a claim, but I wonder if I'm the first person to describe the behavior of one bird using another bird as the verb.
(5) I'd show you a picture of our doughty firefighters, but I haven't asked the Daily Mail (or AP) for permission; and besides, you should know that all properly equipped firefighters in photographs look like Lego people.
(6) This is the true tragedy -- and the serious side -- to this strange story. Some people lost everything and were fortunate to escape unharmed. Little is said of what it took for them to rebuild, when their only mistake was to live in multitenant housing. Who knew? Who could know?
(7) An interesting term, "tower," but I guess it's cooler and less cumbersome than "layer cake of liability," which has too much Julia Child in it. It's basically a bundling of insurance policies that lets your business obtain more coverage for the money.
(8) Property, Plant and Equipment, for the nontechnical.
(9) Also the title of a book by William Gaddis. A Frolic of His Own boasts what (IMHO) is one of the best opening lines in literature: "Justice -- You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law." Gaddis, by the way, is so brilliant he's generally unreadable for mere mortals (I'm one of them). If you try, you'd do well to have a link to The Gaddis Annotations at your elbow, as in: http://www.williamgaddis.org/frolic/index.shtml
(10) But not to pick them, no no. That might be a civil infraction. Come to think of it, frolicking through a field could be criminal trespass, depending on whose field it is. And we all know what happened to serfs who bagged one of the King's deer.
(11) Poor Goya. See (Francisco Goya) for more on this amazing painter. One of his famous sketches is titled "The sleep of reason produces monsters." It, like the Second Amendment, contains wording vague enough to generate at least two interpretations. One, more popular, suggests that when our reason "goes to sleep," monsters are created. True enough, since whole civilizations have been swallowed by the hysteria that attends this kind of sleep. The second, which I use here (and that Goya may have intended), is that reason itself causes monsters -- that the "sleep" induced by reliance of reason causes us to go down "corridors of reason," which often create echo chambers. Entire civilizations have been swallowed this way as well. Indeed, the first may lead to the second, and vice versa. So here, "digital complacency" means to rely on our digital partners instead of ourselves in matters of judgment.
SOURCES - There are many, some more irreverent than others. But all get the basic point across. And some, alas, have been lost, buried in Internet muck somewhere. The Daily Mail article does contain a picture of the Lego firefighters:
And here is some advice, should you really need it, on how to cook squirrel. Good luck:
https://www.hometownlife.com/story/news/local/livonia/2014/12/11/cook-squirrel-carefully/20189485/
The woeful story of the AI agent torching the database may be found here (as well as all over social media):
