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December 25 - December 31, 2021
Women at that time had to teach themselves Latin and Greek, mathematics and the natural sciences, all the ‘masculine’ subjects their brothers could expect to be taught at school. The assumption was that women didn’t have the brains for serious study – and when they did have the brains, too much concentration made them crazy, ill, or lesbian.
Women are as smart as men. I am writing this self-evident proposition because the way the world is, it is not self-evident.
Ada had no social structure in which to exist as Ada. For some reason, maybe the Byronic blood, she didn’t care. She was lucky to have a husband who bored her, but who let her do as she liked – or who didn’t notice what she was up to most of the time, and that included many affairs, and a great deal of money lost on horse racing. She was freakishly lucky to have been given a maths tutor, and blessed to find that she had an intuitive understanding of numbers, as well as the necessary application for long hours of solitary study, at a time when women of her class and kind were encouraged to be
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Babbage had gone to Turin in 1840 to give a lecture on his Analytical Engine. The only person to take any notes was an Italian engineer called Luigi Menabrea. He published these notes a couple of years later in French, in a French journal. Then, as now, Europeans are likely to speak more than one language, while the English don’t bother. In the sunny uplands of Brexit, this legacy of Empire will have to change. Ada, though, was female, and had the usual accomplishments of an upper-class woman destined to entertain Important Men at Dinner Parties. She was fluent in French. She decided to
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Whenever a woman took on a job previously done by a man, the job itself was downgraded. What looks like male chauvinism in the Industrial Revolution, as working men refused to train women to work the machines, was really a fight for survival. A man knew that if his wife or his sister was able to do his job, then he would be paid less. And in lean times only one of them would be offered work. Not him.
Women are still on the road towards full equality with men. Across the world millions of women are still on a track going nowhere. Progress hasn’t materialised for them. Around 800 million people in the world are illiterate. Two-thirds of them are women – and that percentage hasn’t changed for 20 years.
A body of men holding themselves accountable to nobody ought not to be trusted by anybody.
What Turing wanted to do with his body – have sex with men – seemed to be more important to petty, post-war Britain than what he could do with his mind.
Intelligence, certainly, and consciousness, probably, is proving not to be dependent on biology. That shouldn’t be such a surprise. Every religion in the world starts from that premise. Intelligence begins with a non-biological being or beings who create our world, and us. The things we value as being uniquely human don’t start out in any mythology or religion as human values. They are transmitted to us from non-embodied beings who don’t live in a 3D world.
That the planets and stars revolved around the earth wasn’t disputed until Copernicus challenged it in 1543. In 1610, Galileo got out his telescope, and proved by visible evidence that Copernicus was correct. The Catholic Church called the theory foolish and absurd, and put Galileo under house arrest. However, the earth continued to move around the sun.
One of the great hopes for humanity is that AI and AGI will help us to end suffering. This is likely true in terms of better solutions for our energy needs, in terms of both power and resources. Practically, we are trying to develop tools that will serve humankind. That is what AI will allow. There is a bigger picture though, and I suspect that AGI will help humankind to do what it actually needs to do – which is a total reboot of priorities and methods. Our distressing desire to dominate nature and to dominate one another is killing us and killing the planet. Science and tech have accelerated
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Frankenstein and Dracula are keystone texts. Each sits like a bookend at either end of the century, Frankenstein published in 1819, during the early part of the Industrial Revolution, and Dracula published in 1897, as the century that had seen more change than any other period of history came to a close.
Organ transplants are already on the way to becoming synthetic. 3D printing in medicine, known as bio-printing, has already successfully included a thyroid gland, a windpipe, a tibia replacement, and a patch of heart cells. Heart transplants using a human heart could be a thing of the past in less than a decade. If damaged body parts can be printed on demand, costs are lowered, shortages are eliminated, and it is less likely that the patient will reject the transplant, as the patient’s own stem cells will be included in the newly printed organ.
As we noted earlier, what is now solid science began as sci-fi. In the November 1950 issue of the US Astounding Science Fiction magazine, there’s a story called ‘Tools of the Trade’ that imagines a ‘molecular spray’. At least that’s the reference you will read if you search for it – but there’s a much earlier one: the creation story in the Book of Genesis. 3D printing involves making a solid out of a digital image. God says, ‘Let us make man in our own image,’ and proceeds to do it with a molecular mixture of dust and the breath of life. Sounds like 3D printing to me.
All the carbon-fibre prosthetics, smart implants, 3D-printed replacement parts, days of leisure, robot love, long life, enhanced abilities, perhaps even the end of physical death, aren’t enough, separately or together, to remake a mind. If we are still violent, greedy, intolerant, racist, sexist, patriarchal, and generally vile, really, what is the point of being able to open your garage with your finger and run faster than a cheetah? That’s the vampire warning – maybe you do live forever, but your mindset is stuck in a medieval castle in Transylvania.
In China, Beijing-based robotics company Cloud 9 sent 14 medical bots to Wuhan to help care for Covid patients. Their humanoid service robot Ginger (a Pepper-style bot) helped with hospital admissions, while telling jokes. Patients responded well. Humans can get tired and snappy; robots won’t. At the end of a long day, patients were still greeted with enthusiasm – and the surprise factor seems to have cheered people up. We used to associate ‘virus’ with computers. Computer-programmed robots can’t catch human viruses. These bots will increasingly manage routine medical procedures, like
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How often do we just need a sympathetic ear? And we all know that we spend half our lives not really listening as someone downloads or lets off steam – and that is fine. There is a presence. Presence is important. It doesn’t have to be biological. And if it did, prayer would be ineffective. When humans talk to their god, they feel better.
It is difficult for humans to manage abstract thinking without something 3D to hold on to – the Roman Catholic Church understood that, and filled places of worship with statues, villages with shrines, feast days with carvings of saints, and gave the faithful amulets, relics, and rosaries in their hands – literally – in order to concentrate on the ineffable and unknowable ‘other’.
50 years ago few people used computers. There were no smartphones. There was no streaming. No social network. In 50 years from now we will wonder how we lived before AI systems and their robots came to live with us. By then, I am confident AI will have developed into AGI and humans and alternative life-forms will share the planet together.
I see all types of homophobia, or sexual-identity discrimination, as gender discrimination. It comes back to ideas about what a man ‘should’ be. What a woman ‘is’.
At present – and accelerated by Covid – trustworthy and fact-based journalism is under threat across the world. Fox, or Breitbart, or the self-appointed conspiracy theorists and hate-mongers of social media, are straight out of Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. The alt-right likes alt-facts. Faced with actual facts, they will argue, ‘that’s just your opinion’. This reached its apotheosis (so far) when Trump and his tribe claimed that he had won the 2020 election – when all the facts proved otherwise.
The problem for Facebook, in particular, is that dangerous, obscene, and objectionable content is valuable to its bottom line. Nasty gets more clicks and shares than truth and love – yes, that is the kind of folks we are – and clicks and shares drive advertising revenue.
when institutional content tries to be more user-friendly, we get marketing-speak clichés like: stakeholders, bad actors, road maps, blue-sky thinking, low-hanging fruit, facilitators, roll-out … Conferences are the worst. I have been to some of them. By the afternoon I am sweating under the mental pressure of translating non-language. We need writers involved – and we need language that speaks to people. This isn’t about dumbing down, it’s about doing what writers do well – finding a clear, precise, everyday language that goes beyond utility, without jargon, with beauty.
