Letter to the Editor:
Via The Burbank Channel, people all over the world can see our City’s elected governing panel. And, what an uncool collection of human dalliers they are seen to be when they appear improperly dressed for the official occasion of their Tuesday meetings! Perhaps there is an attention-commanding solution: lime-yellow electronicized uniforms a la Star Trek! (School students and jail inmates wear uniforms, so why not all members of the City Council, possibly displayed on TV monitors worldwide?)
Since we live in the 21st Century, citizen commanders ought to be dressed to identify the organization they represent. Those Star Trek leaders wore simple, non-electronicized, clothes designed by Andre Courreges, Paco Rebane and Pierre Cardin. The principle of the outer space-suit might apply, meaning that Council Uniforms could perform novel tasks of revealing to voters some aspects of the Members personality, such as if they are lying whilst addressing worried and harassed taxpayers via a publicly-funded broadcasting system named The Burbank Channel.
Since Burbankers don’t yet possess Wonder Woman’s “Lasso of Truth”, sociologist Robert King Merton’s “Introspectometer” or novelist James Halperin’s postulated (and supposed available by AD 2024) “The Truth Machine” we could look backwards to circa December 1966. It was then, in an unsigned Note penned for the HARVARD LAW JOURNAL (Vol. 80, No. 2, pages 403-421) that a proposal was summarized at length for “Anthropotelemetry: Dr. Schwitzgebel’s Machine”. In effect, Dr. Ralph Kirkland Schwitzgebel (1934-2015) proposed suitings for the institution of the perfect 21st Century politician!
Imagine a scenario unfolding soon in Burbank, before at least an audience of Burbankers, where all our Star Trek-outfitted City Council Members were constantly electronically monitored–like hospital patients–by identical electronics-laced clothing. Such total environmental City Hall garb, with all read-outs displayed simultaneously beside their TV visage, subjected the voters and others to real-time visual scrutiny of such important elected local authorities!
There could arrive soon, then, a new voter-judged Age of Performance Preferability through detection and AI announcements of lies. Since people usually refrain from accusations due to legal backlash fears of false accusations as well as sheer self-indulgent politeness, the monitored Burbank City Council Members will have to explain why the AI supervisor’s readout is incorrect. Such additional testimony could, therefore, substantiate or disprove the AI Star Trek uniform monitoring AI machine’s preliminary assessment of the Council Member’s actual truth/falsehood condition.
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
