ABOUT once a month I run across a person who radiates an inner light. These people can be in any walk of life. They seem deeply good. They listen well. They make you feel funny and valued. You often catch them looking after other people and as they do so their laugh is musical and their manner is infused with gratitude. They are not thinking about what wonderful work they are doing. They are not thinking about themselves at all.
Writing a book about the quest for ethical perfection, Schur risked coming across as unbearably pedantic or worse, sanctimonious, but he grounds his overviews of abstract doctrines in self-deprecating digressions. He confesses he still has books by Woody Allen on his shelves and hasn’t been able to renounce him even after allegations of sexual abuse came to light. He describes the self-loathing he would feel whenever he left a tip at Starbucks but paused to make sure that the barista saw him do it. He agonizes over his privileged status as an educated, affluent white man, worries that his hybrid car is still bad for the environment and frets that the money he spends on baseball tickets and other luxuries could have gone to people in need. (He’s donating his earnings from the book to several charities and nonprofits, he said.)
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Born in Ann Arbor, Mich., and raised in Connecticut in a casually Unitarian family, Schur has had a charmed career that he attributes to a series of lucky accidents, beginning with the day he stayed home sick from school and his mom let him watch Allen’s movie “Sleeper.” At Harvard, where he majored in English, he joined the Lampoon, a comedy magazine that has served as a pipeline for TV writers, and those connections helped him land a job as a writer for “Saturday Night Live” in 1998.
He was later hired as a writer for “The Office,” and around the third season, he signed an overall deal with NBCUniversal. He went on to cocreate “Parks and Recreation” and “Brooklyn Nine-Nine,” both wholesome workplace comedies. When the network gave him free rein to make a show about anything he wanted, he pitched “The Good Place.”
Early on, he ran into a problem: He didn’t know much about moral philosophy. So he started a self-taught course in ethics, reading works by Aristotle, Kant, Mill, Bentham, Rawls and others, and devouring academic papers he found online.
When he found concepts to be impenetrable, he sought out professionals. He asked Pamela Hieronymi, a philosophy professor at U.C.L.A, to be an adviser for the show, and she gave lectures in the writers room and guided writers through conundrums like the Trolley Problem. “He wants it to be digestible, but he doesn’t want to water it down,” she said of Schur.
Schur also brought on the philosopher Todd May as a consultant after reading his book, “Death.” Schur would sometimes send May an urgent email with a “philosophical emergency” when he was worried he had bungled some ethical nuance.
In 1965, the average top chief executive made 21 times as much as a typical worker in America. In 2020, the ratio was 351 to 1.
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| Mike Lester |
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| Robots v. Immigrants |
"We are fascinated by machines that can control cars, compose symphonies, or defeat people at chess, Go, or Jeopardy! While more progress is being made all the time in Artificial Intelligence (AI), some scientists and philosophers warn of the dangers of an uncontrollable superintelligent AI. Using theoretical calculations, an international team of researchers, including scientists from the Center for Humans and Machines at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, shows that it would not be possible to control a superintelligent AI."
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| Jill Greenberg |
