The Curiosity rover has been on Mars since 2012, and it has worked longer than we imagined it would survive in that hostile environment. As it has slowly roamed the planet’s surface, it has encountered significant evidence that the Martian surface once had running water. That evidence lies in photos of pebbles and cobbles, both rounded (smoothed) stones whose angular edges were likely banged off in rock-on-rock collisions in turbid water. Curiosity has also sent us photos of mud cracks; you’ve seen them on your own planet where once-wet soil shrinks as it dries during droughty periods.
 
We can tell what happened in the past by the surface features of a planet. Can we do the same with humans? Look at those wrinkles. Too much sun, or maybe too many cigarettes. Certainly, not enough hydration. Possibly even crystal meth.
 
But what about signs of past behavior not associated with physical appearance? What about deceitfulness? What about compassion? Can we read those and other past traits in the present face?
 
We all bear some evidence of what we have been though such evidence might not be immediately visible. It’s difficult for any of us to change behavior. So, for example, when I was a kid, my mother used to say, “Sit up straight when you eat; use your napkin (One wonders why God gave us sleeves). How you eat at home is how you’ll eat in public.” She was right of course, and we all know that we get good at whatever we practice, even our bad habits, our negative attitudes, and our personal philosophy.
 
Could each of us consider what we might gain from having a Curiosity roam over evidence of our past? Should each of us be self-curious about how we got to have the features—facial and behavioral—we now have? How much of our past is evident in what we are? How much do we try to hide?
 
Curiosity doesn’t have the ability to do what we do on Earth. Here at the home planet we can drill deeply into the rocks, mine, and analyze in great detail. Trying to find evidence from afar is a difficult process. But isn’t that what we do with others? We get little samples, limited pictures of others’ lives. From what we know we assume analogs. But like the astrogeologists who look at what Curiosity reveals in its limited range of slow exploration in light of what they know about our home world, we look at others’ surface features and conclude on the basis of what we know about our own lives.
 
It is possible that some unknown mechanism accounted for the features on Mars that mimic the features we see on Earth. However, we have only Earth’s features and processes as our guide. I guess each of us really relies similarly on our own features and processes as we conclude what happened in others’ lives. We are probably correct some of the time, but analyzing from a distance isn’t foolproof. And as we all know, our planet has its share of fools. 

So many brains, so many similar thoughts. That is what ran through my brain when I encountered the title of an online April 9, 2018, article by Matthew Hutson. His title? “Could Artificial Intelligence Get Depressed and Have Hallucinations?”* My similar thought? Could we make an angry robot? I’m not the first to consider the question.
 
I asked that question to some experts in the field of anger management at the National Anger Management Conference in Washington, D.C. just four days before Hutson’s article appeared. Not that I was expecting a detailed answer from those accomplished experts. Writing software for a robot would consume time more valuably spent in helping angry humans with their uncontrolled emotions. But I asked the question in light of my own desire to understand human emotion—any human emotion.** The key to making a robot humanlike is to incorporate whatever we deem to be human into its programming. We know already that we can incorporate language. For example, my computer catches me when I misspell and tries to correct my intentional conversational fragments.***
 
Science fiction has addressed the issue of robots and human nature in many stories. Take Star Trek: The Next Generation, for example. Data is a robot (android) in search of its (his) inner human. The first Star Trek series also addressed the issue on more than one occasion, and the first Star Trek movie ended with a merger of human and machine. Remember, too, that famous computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL is highly rational but lacking in feeling for the dignity and value of the humans on the spaceship whom he attempts to kill.
 
It’s difficult to humanize a machine, and when writers and directors do humanize one, the product is often more likely to put real humans in jeopardy, the way Blade Runner’s replicant Roy Batty nearly kills Decker or the cyborg in Terminator almost kills Sarah. Wasn’t Artificial Intelligence one of the dangers that the late Stephen Hawking said we faced?  
 
If we can answer the question I asked about making an angry robot, we might learn more about what it is that we are. Anger can be an intense emotion. But as experts acknowledge, it manifests itself in a variety of expressions and levels of intensity that change with person, place, and circumstance. Through the evolution of mammals those variations of emotions are programmed into humans. Would robotic evolution follow a similar path? Or, have we started robotic development from where we now stand with somewhat inadequate knowledge of what we are? Note that there are numerous versions of philosophy and psychology and that those versions have changed.   
 
How do we program variations into robots? The giant robot Gort in the original film The Day the Earth Stood Still had absolute power to eliminate any threat, even if that threat comes from a species that initially granted such power to Gort and its ilk. As emotionless guardians of the galaxy Gort’s kind would have no qualms about killing.     
 
If we do program an angry robot, can we also include in the programming the potential to manage that anger with the help of an anger management specialist? Could a specialist apply psychological techniques to calm a raging robot?  
 
Making an angry robot—or a loving one full of empathy—is the ultimate accomplishment in AI design. True, an angry robot would be dangerous. We already have a good idea of what anger can do in and to our species. But in designing an angry robot, we would have to know anger holistically. We would have to understand it, not just in terms of twenty-first century social constructs and psychological analyses, but rather as a human trait traceable from some Cain in a cave to some astronaut in a spacecraft on the way to Proxima Centauri.
 
The current status of AI is interesting. Try typing ai into a Word document. You’ll get an underline that your computer will use to indicate you made a mistake; AI, not ai, is the proper way to address the entity. Now type human. The computer doesn’t seem to care whether or not you use the lower case unless you use the word to begin a sentence.
 
So, as AI evolves, will it care? If it does care, if it underlines human because it expects a capital “H” out of respect, will it also empathize? Will it get angry if we write “ai”? Will it get help to manage its anger? Oh! And one more question: Will an angry robot seek emotional help from a human anger management specialist or a robotic one?
 
* http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/could-artificial-intelligence-get-depressed-and-have-hallucinations
 
**Saying I want to understand emotion might raise an eyebrow. Understanding. Emotion. One implies rationality; one doesn’t. Can we understand emotions? Or, do we simply apply logical constructs that satisfy the outer brain while frustrating the inner one? Psychologists, counselors, and psychotherapists might note that they have a handle on emotions, and they might refer me to their manual on disorders to say how emotions play their roles. Or, they might point out behavioral manifestations of emotions. Or, they might refer me to studies on compassion and empathy. “There,” they might say, “that’s what that emotion ‘means’.” So, for a layperson like me, understanding might not be possible. Love? Well, why can’t we express it in some language other than “I love you”? Everyone says that love is a “powerful” emotion; yet, it appears to be limited to a three-word expression. Anger? “I’m very angry. I’m very upset.”
 
Do we “understand” emotions when we connect with another emotionally? Is it possible that I just don’t understand the word understand?
 
***My computer does not, however, express concern that I often write sentence fragments. Can you imagine: “Dummy, how many times do I have to correct your grammar? How many times will you write a sentence fragment? I’m getting tired of this.”

Mary had a little lamb whose embryonic body contained 0.01% human cells. Is that good or baaaaad? The background is this: “a team led by researchers at Stanford University has created a sheep/human hybrid.”* Here’s the understatement: “Such research tends to be contentious….” No kidding.
 
Presented by Pablo Ross at the Annual Meeting of the AAAS, the research reveals work done on interspecies blastocyst complementation for the purpose of generating human organs in animals. Entitled “Towards Xenogeneic Generation of Human Organs,” the research was probably well meant, the project used human stem cells to make a sheep-human embryo through the use of CRISPR. Imagine that, or don’t. The end, of course, is a supply of ready-made human organs—good for the recipient, bad for the sheep.  
 
We’re long past Dolly the cloned sheep, aren’t we? I can think of the gooood: No more going to the store to buy a coat because we’ll produce our own wool: Just grow it in autumn and shear it in spring. I’ve never seen a sheep shiver, so I’m guessing its wool keeps it warm. And if mountain sheep get to participate, sheep-humans might even be more sure-footed over uneven terrain. Think. Fewer falls mean a savings in emergency room costs. Certainly, the new hybrid will engender new TV food shows and celebrity chefs: Gourmet Grasses, Awful Offal Chefs, and Mutton for Nothin’.
 
Are there dangers? Isn’t there a chance that with a sheep/human body part, the recipient will become “contentious,” butting heads with anyone who disagrees or challenges? We already have enough head-butting in our species, don’t we? And now that we know the dangers of chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) we should be especially concerned about a built-in system for tau protein accumulation.
 
This sheep/human business is troubling in other ways. Do we isolate from or intermix the members of this new “breed.” Will they have their own ghetto? Gated community? Segregated farm, maybe hybridizing Romanov sheep for Russians and Suffolk sheep for Englishmen? Will there be protests over their short lives and exploitation? Will sheep/humans be used in sacrifices during the Hindu festival of Yadnya Kasada? That’s the festival in Indonesia that appeases the god of Mount Bromo with sheep thrown into the volcano.
 
Ewe understand, don’t you?
 
* https://phys.org/news/2018-02-successful-human-animal-hybrid-sheep-embryo.html and
https://aaas.confex.com/aaas/2018/meetingapp.cgi/Paper/20877

On the scale of armies, facelessness has little effect on motivation. Anonymous soldiers kill anonymous soldiers. The evolution of weapons has ensured anonymity by increasing the distance between opponents: From spears, bows, and trebuchets to canon, missiles, and today’s faceless robots, the mechanisms of war have separated enemies and made them faceless. Yet, in their anonymity governments maintain their motivation to fight. On the scale of individuals in conflict, however, identifiable faces support a continued conflict. Consider now what occurs when an individual has a potential conflict with a faceless bureaucracy.
 
Here’s an interesting result from a study on rationalization as it affects motivation. According to Kristin Laurin of the University of British Columbia, we tend to have more favorable attitudes toward enacted policies after they become enforceable than we have when they are merely proposed changes to the status quo: “…it’s rationalization: When something becomes a part of the present reality, even when it’s something you don’t like, you find ways of tricking yourself into thinking it’s not quite so bad,” she explains.* Laurin calls the acceptance of a newly enacted policy the result of a “psychological immune system.” Do you think her study has merit?
 
I didn’t personally like legalizing pot, for example, but I’m already immune to the idea to which I objected before Colorado enacted the policy. Is my rapid acquiescence to an inexorable change proof that Laurin is correct? The title of the online story covering her Psychological Science article is “People rationalize Policies as Soon as They Take Effect.” In my case, a really rapid acquiescence to a reality over which I have no control.
 
I might note that we don’t really have to accept policies we don’t like. We can struggle to effect a change of change. There are numerous examples of people refusing to acquiesce to policies enacted by nameless authorities. Take the struggle of parents nationwide in reaction to Outcomes Based Education (OBE), a teaching methodology that included making an entire class retake a test if a certain percentage of the class failed the test. Yes, you can imagine it: Under OBE children who aced a test were required to retake the same test when their classmates failed it in a colossal waste of time for those who studied. Parents fought the system, eliminating it rather than acquiescing to the policy emplaced by largely anonymous school boards and administrations.
 
You probably have your own examples of those who continued to struggle against policies that organizations, agencies, legislatures, and even churches imposed upon their constituents. You might also have examples of the “psychological immune system” in action. Maybe you have acquiesced to some policy changes you initially resisted.
 
Is Laurin’s “psychological immune system” just a manifestation of fatigue? Do people just grow tired of struggling against a somewhat amorphous anonymity peopled by the faceless? Is yielding a sign of weakness? Or, should we recognize that there are battles worth fighting and battles not worth fighting?
 
Are policy changes derived from anonymous sources more easily accepted than those that derive from identifiable individuals? You connect a face, you fight. No face, no fight, or rarely a fight.
 
Colorado has no face. As one on the periphery of the pot issue, I have no identifiable individual upon whom I can pin the pot policy though I’m sure that someone in Colorado can affix faces to policy. For me it was a “legislative act” in another state. But interestingly, Outcomes Based Education also had no face for most people. Yes, both legalizing pot and structuring OBE had initial proponents who had faces, but as both policies progressed they moved to the level of facelessness. The policies became entities unto themselves. The difference in the post-enactment reactions is that the parents who fought against OBE weren’t fighting against OBE’s proponents’ faces, but rather for their children’s faces.
 
We acquiesce because much of our world is structured anonymously. We fight when we see the enemy’s face or the face of someone we wish to protect. The former is a matter of “against,” whereas the latter is a matter of “for.”  
 
 
*Association for Psychological Science (APS) online at https://www.psychologicalscience.org/news/releases/people-rationalize-policies-as-soon-as-they-take-effect.html

The Pennsylvania Turnpike crosses over and through a number of different geologic formations and structures. Road cuts reveal the interiors of the mountains, showing layers of rocks that appear vertical in some places and bent into curves in others. The geologic section of Pennsylvania (and other parts of the Appalachians from New York to Alabama) that comprises “waves” of rocks is known as the Valley and Ridge Province. The province resulted from the convergence of the African and North American tectonic plates.
 
The “waves” are composed of downward warped rocks and upward warped ones of once-horizontal sedimentary layers lying in low elevations. “U”-shaped rocks make wave troughs and are called synclines, whereas upside-down “U”s make wave crests and are dubbed anticlines. Many of the rock-wave troughs ironically form elongate ridges that parallel one another on either side of valleys cut into anticlines.* In most places, only parts of the rock-waves are visible, showing diagonal or vertical to near-vertical layers of sandstone, shale, and limestone. The bending of Valley and Ridge rocks into waves took millions of years and occurred before the first dinosaur walked the land, and it built mountains that would rival the elevations of today’s highest ranges.** Think about it: The pressure of convergence elevated the land into lofty mountains.
 
The rock-waves show that Earth’s seemingly rigid materials, its rocks, can bend with sufficient force, even if they bend only in pulses of warping over a long time. But note: Not all that is brittle bends. Offset layers of bent rock layers in the Valley and Ridge reveal an occasional break, a fault, and offsetting isn’t the only product of faulting. The grinding of opposite sides of a fault can produce a breccia, a layer of jagged rock fragments that fills a fault. Nevertheless, bending without breaking dominates faulting in the province; the region is more bent than broken.
 
In a way, human convergence can mirror the rocks of the Valley and Ridge: Sometimes bent by pressure; sometimes broken and fragmented. When we have little to lose, we’ll bend a little, and the bending can even elevate us to an altitude of mutual altruism. When we consider our so-called core ideas, our ideology, however, we often find ourselves incapable of any plasticity.
 
Take extremists of any bent, for example. Their ideologies are rigid, so their positions are usually inflexible. Frustrated that bending doesn’t occur, people of opposing ideologies apply force that results at best in filling the boundary between the two with a breccia of both ideas and ideologues. An inflexible ideology appears to be harder to bend than solid rock. Look, for example, at the centuries-old resistance to change in conflicts between Sunnis and Shia, Protestants and Catholics, Christians and Muslims, Hutu and Tutsi, and, go on, you can name many other opposing groups, including, possibly, you and some relative or neighbor, some rival gangs, or even some rival socioeconomic classes. People often resist bending until either they break or their opponents fragment.
 
Could we learn something from “rock-waves”? Ideologues bend very slowly if at all because their core ideas have little plasticity. Rather than bend with the forces of opposition to form lofty mountains of compromise and mutual altruism, they resist until nothing but rubble fills the gap. Whereas geologic history records more bending than faulting, human history records more faulting than warping. That’s a shame. The dominance of “rock-waves” in the Valley and Ridge indicates that rocks appear to be more flexible than humans.
 
* Sideling Hill lies in both Maryland and Pennsylvania and is an example of a synclinal mountain; see pics at
https://images.search.yahoo.com/yhs/search?p=pics+of+sideling+hill&fr=yhs-Lkry-SF01&hspart=Lkry&hsimp=yhs-SF01&imgurl=http%3A%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2F-MBG90YCMXgo%2FVdM8jBjMKxI%2FAAAAAAABFxs%2FjiLsJmM8KoU%2FSideling-Hill-Road-Cut-21%2525255B6%2525255D.jpg%3Fimgmax%3D800#id=1&iurl=http%3A%2F%2Flh3.googleusercontent.com%2F-MBG90YCMXgo%2FVdM8jBjMKxI%2FAAAAAAABFxs%2FjiLsJmM8KoU%2FSideling-Hill-Road-Cut-21%2525255B6%2525255D.jpg%3Fimgmax%3D800&action=click
A small fault can be seen near the top.
** More than 200 million years of erosion have reduced the elevations of Valley and Ridge mountains.