WEBVTT - Episode 6: Baby X 0:00:15.436 --> 0:00:15.876 Pushkin. 0:00:20.236 --> 0:00:25.836 Americans do this really weird thing. Expectant parents hold gender 0:00:25.996 --> 0:00:27.396 reveal parties. 0:00:27.756 --> 0:00:30.716 Now to the mystery explosion that rocked a southern New 0:00:30.756 --> 0:00:31.596 Hampshire town. 0:00:35.436 --> 0:00:39.756 They often feature explosions with smoke that's either pink or blue. 0:00:40.156 --> 0:00:42.476 An alarming number of these stunts have gone ry. 0:00:42.876 --> 0:00:46.156 Turns out that blast came from an over the top 0:00:46.276 --> 0:00:50.876 gender reveal party, a couple apparently using explosives to announce 0:00:50.876 --> 0:00:51.916 the sex of their baby. 0:00:52.196 --> 0:00:55.636 People have been killed, houses have burned to the ground, 0:00:55.836 --> 0:00:56.716 even forests. 0:00:56.876 --> 0:00:59.356 We begin tonight with new video released from the US 0:00:59.436 --> 0:01:03.356 fourst Service showing the moment a gender reveal video started 0:01:03.396 --> 0:01:05.836 the forty seven thousand acre sawmill fire. 0:01:09.596 --> 0:01:12.796 For their first baby. Elon Musk and his then girlfriend, 0:01:12.956 --> 0:01:17.196 the musician Grimes didn't hold a gender reveal party in 0:01:17.236 --> 0:01:21.316 a way. They did the opposite. In twenty twenty, on Twitter, 0:01:21.596 --> 0:01:25.116 they announced the birth of a baby named X. Grimes 0:01:25.196 --> 0:01:28.756 said the baby would be raised without a gender. Like 0:01:28.876 --> 0:01:32.716 most things involving Musk, this idea has ties to science fiction. 0:01:33.596 --> 0:01:36.956 Once upon a time, a baby named X was born. 0:01:37.436 --> 0:01:40.036 The story of Baby X was published in nineteen seventy 0:01:40.076 --> 0:01:44.076 two in Miss, a feminist magazine. During its very first year, 0:01:44.396 --> 0:01:46.476 at the height of the women's liberation movement. 0:01:46.916 --> 0:01:50.076 This baby was named X so that nobody could tell 0:01:50.156 --> 0:01:53.556 whether it was a boy or a girl. Its parents 0:01:53.556 --> 0:01:57.236 could tell, of course, but they couldn't tell anybody else. 0:01:57.996 --> 0:02:02.076 They couldn't even tell Baby X, at least not until 0:02:02.196 --> 0:02:05.716 much much later. You see, it was all part of 0:02:05.756 --> 0:02:11.276 a very important secret scientific X known officially as Project 0:02:11.396 --> 0:02:12.156 Baby X. 0:02:17.156 --> 0:02:21.196 Baby X began as a feminist thought experiment. How did 0:02:21.236 --> 0:02:23.876 it come to be the name of Elon Musk's youngest child? 0:02:24.676 --> 0:02:27.356 In a broader sense, what's the place of ideas about 0:02:27.396 --> 0:02:31.596 families in Silicon Valley futurism? And are there other ideas 0:02:31.636 --> 0:02:33.756 about families that maybe ought to have a place in 0:02:33.796 --> 0:02:41.156 any vision of the future. Welcome to X Man, the 0:02:41.276 --> 0:02:45.596 Elon Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian, 0:02:45.676 --> 0:02:48.476 a professor at Harvard, and for a long time I've 0:02:48.476 --> 0:02:53.716 been studying the relationship between technological and political change. This series, 0:02:53.756 --> 0:02:56.996 I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism. Call it Muskism. 0:02:57.516 --> 0:03:03.636 Extravagant extreme capitalism. Extraterrestrial capitalism. Were stock prices for projects 0:03:03.636 --> 0:03:09.196 from Tesla and SpaceX to cryptocurrencies and neural implants can 0:03:09.276 --> 0:03:13.676 be driven by fantasies that come from science fiction. I'm 0:03:13.716 --> 0:03:17.316 fascinated by science fiction, even by comic books. They once 0:03:17.356 --> 0:03:19.916 wrote a whole book of political history of Wonder Woman. 0:03:21.236 --> 0:03:24.196 The science fiction men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezosidor 0:03:24.796 --> 0:03:29.596 generally concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful and often 0:03:29.636 --> 0:03:36.276 immensely rich men colonize other planets. This episode, which is 0:03:36.316 --> 0:03:38.716 called Baby X, I want to take a look at 0:03:38.716 --> 0:03:41.156 the science fiction that's usually left out of that vision, 0:03:41.956 --> 0:03:47.876 new wave afrofuturism, feminist science fiction, postcolonial science fiction, including 0:03:47.916 --> 0:03:49.796 the story of Baby X. 0:03:50.476 --> 0:03:53.516 The smartest scientists had set up this experiment at a 0:03:53.516 --> 0:03:57.636 cost of exactly twenty three billion dollars and seventy two cents. 0:03:58.436 --> 0:04:01.596 This might seem like a lot for one baby, even 0:04:01.636 --> 0:04:05.796 if it was an important, secret scientific experimental Baby. 0:04:06.236 --> 0:04:09.076 This sort of science fiction generally involves both ideas about 0:04:09.196 --> 0:04:12.436 gender and sexuality and actual people who are not men, 0:04:12.836 --> 0:04:16.796 women and children, babies. Even I think it can help 0:04:16.836 --> 0:04:21.396 explain the domestic politics of Muskism. This Elon Musk origin 0:04:21.476 --> 0:04:27.156 story starts back at the beginning of this century. Elon 0:04:27.236 --> 0:04:30.076 Musk met his first wife, the Canadian writer Justine Wilson, 0:04:30.196 --> 0:04:33.076 in college. They married in the year two thousand and 0:04:33.116 --> 0:04:36.876 had a baby who died tragically, and then triplets and twins. 0:04:37.516 --> 0:04:40.396 After the marriage ended, Wilson wrote an essay called I 0:04:40.516 --> 0:04:43.596 Was a Starter Wife for Marie Claire, a women's magazine, 0:04:44.236 --> 0:04:47.836 about how weeks after Musk filed for divorce he texted her. 0:04:47.916 --> 0:04:50.396 She wrote to say he was engaged to a gorgeous 0:04:50.436 --> 0:04:55.116 British actress in her early twenties. Musk and that actress married, divorced, remarried, 0:04:55.396 --> 0:05:00.636 and then divorced again in twenty sixteen. In twenty eighteen, 0:05:00.996 --> 0:05:04.996 Musk met Claire Bouchet, an innovative Canadian born musician known 0:05:04.996 --> 0:05:10.796 as Grimes. She'd studied neuroscience at McGill. Like Musk, Grimes 0:05:10.876 --> 0:05:13.876 is an avid science fiction fan. Her first album was 0:05:13.916 --> 0:05:17.596 a tribute to Doune. The New Yorker once called her 0:05:17.716 --> 0:05:25.116 a mad pop scientist. Being Musk's girlfriend and doing things 0:05:25.156 --> 0:05:28.276 like defending him against charges that he prevented Tesla workers 0:05:28.316 --> 0:05:31.756 from unionizing annoyed a lot of her fans. She was 0:05:31.796 --> 0:05:35.676 attacked with the particular venom reserved for female artists and writers. 0:05:36.236 --> 0:05:39.876 Grimes has got a sophisticated interest in gender and voice. 0:05:40.756 --> 0:05:43.476 Hey everybody, this is Grimes and I'm very excited to 0:05:43.476 --> 0:05:46.756 be here kicking off my brand new six month residency 0:05:47.116 --> 0:05:48.916 for BBC Radio One. 0:05:49.076 --> 0:05:51.196 After she got pregnant, she hosted. 0:05:50.796 --> 0:05:54.196 A radio show and the theme is sci Fi Baby 0:05:54.956 --> 0:05:59.036 or Weird Science Fiction and Electronic Music for Babies. 0:06:00.076 --> 0:06:02.916 A few months later, in May of twenty twenty, announcing 0:06:02.916 --> 0:06:05.796 their baby's birth, Musk said it was a boy, but 0:06:05.916 --> 0:06:09.516 Grimes declined to mention its gender and tweeted, I don't 0:06:09.516 --> 0:06:11.716 want to gender them in case that's not how they 0:06:11.716 --> 0:06:14.756 feel in their life. At the time, this looked like 0:06:14.796 --> 0:06:18.596 another example of so called gender neutral parenting, which had 0:06:18.636 --> 0:06:22.716 recently had some uptake among people, including celebrities, who believed 0:06:22.756 --> 0:06:26.076 children should get the opportunity to decide their own gender identity. 0:06:26.996 --> 0:06:30.076 In twenty eleven, when Grimes was at McGill, there'd been 0:06:30.116 --> 0:06:32.356 a lot of coverage of a family in Canada. 0:06:32.756 --> 0:06:34.996 Well is a couple in Toronto that is creating quite 0:06:35.036 --> 0:06:37.276 a stir right now because they're raising their baby what 0:06:37.276 --> 0:06:38.956 they're calling gender free. 0:06:39.396 --> 0:06:42.436 This all seems very twenty first century, born out of 0:06:42.436 --> 0:06:46.436 the heated contemporary culture war over trans writes, but it's 0:06:46.476 --> 0:06:49.596 also very nineteen seventies and second wave feminist. 0:06:50.076 --> 0:06:53.636 It's an X was absolutely all they would tell anyone, 0:06:54.196 --> 0:06:56.836 and that make the friends and relatives very angry. 0:06:57.316 --> 0:07:00.116 The story of Baby X from nineteen seventy two was 0:07:00.116 --> 0:07:03.116 written by Lois Gould, a novelist and mother of two boys, 0:07:03.316 --> 0:07:05.836 who was also an editor of Ladies Home Journal and 0:07:05.876 --> 0:07:08.396 a columnist for the New York Times, where she wrote 0:07:08.396 --> 0:07:11.276 the Hers Caumn. At the time Gold was writing, a 0:07:11.276 --> 0:07:13.476 lot of feminists had been arguing that kids should be 0:07:13.516 --> 0:07:15.876 able to wear whatever clothes they want and play with 0:07:15.916 --> 0:07:18.156 whatever toys they want, not just pants and trucks for 0:07:18.236 --> 0:07:20.436 boys and dresses and dolls for girls. 0:07:20.836 --> 0:07:23.436 So they bought plenty of sturdy blue pajamas in the 0:07:23.436 --> 0:07:27.476 boys department and cheerful flowered underwear in the girls department, 0:07:27.996 --> 0:07:31.836 and they bought all kinds of toys. The head scientists 0:07:31.836 --> 0:07:36.076 of Project Baby X checked all their purchases and told 0:07:36.116 --> 0:07:37.956 them to keep up the good work. 0:07:38.716 --> 0:07:42.356 In nineteen seventy five, Baby X, the feminist fable, led 0:07:42.396 --> 0:07:45.956 to an actual scientific experiment whose results were published in 0:07:45.956 --> 0:07:48.756 a journal article that was also called Baby X. 0:07:49.196 --> 0:07:53.076 Although the story was science fiction fantasy. The question of 0:07:53.076 --> 0:07:56.356 how adults would actually respond to a child appeared to 0:07:56.396 --> 0:07:57.436 merit investigation. 0:07:58.236 --> 0:08:01.396 Forty two volunteers, mostly graduate students at the City University 0:08:01.396 --> 0:08:03.396 of New York, were put in a lab with a 0:08:03.436 --> 0:08:05.116 baby under different conditions. 0:08:05.516 --> 0:08:08.476 Those in the male and female conditions were told that 0:08:08.516 --> 0:08:11.276 there was a three month old baby boy or baby 0:08:11.356 --> 0:08:14.236 girl to play with, while those in the neutral condition 0:08:14.596 --> 0:08:16.836 were told that there was a three month old baby 0:08:17.076 --> 0:08:19.196 with no mention of its sex or name. 0:08:20.076 --> 0:08:23.516 Unsurprisingly, the volunteers interacted differently with the baby, depending on 0:08:23.516 --> 0:08:25.556 whether they'd been told it was a boy or a 0:08:25.556 --> 0:08:28.876 girl or just a baby. But the sort of experiment 0:08:29.036 --> 0:08:32.036 has other origins too, especially in the work of one 0:08:32.076 --> 0:08:35.156 of the most influential science fiction writers of the last century, 0:08:35.556 --> 0:08:40.236 Ursula k Legwin, who on BBC Radio four introduced herself 0:08:40.276 --> 0:08:40.916 this way. 0:08:41.036 --> 0:08:43.916 I am a man. Now you may think I've made 0:08:44.156 --> 0:08:47.436 some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that 0:08:47.476 --> 0:08:49.916 I'm trying to fool you, because my first name ends 0:08:49.996 --> 0:08:53.196 in A, and I own three bras, and I've been 0:08:53.196 --> 0:08:57.436 pregnant five times. When I was born, there actually were 0:08:57.436 --> 0:09:01.036 only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun 0:09:01.196 --> 0:09:06.996 his pronoun I'm the generic he as in, if anybody 0:09:07.036 --> 0:09:10.036 needs an abortion, he will have to go to another state. 0:09:10.756 --> 0:09:13.876 Legwin was born in California in nineteen twenty nine. In 0:09:13.876 --> 0:09:16.316 the nineteen fifties, she was studying for a PhD in 0:09:16.436 --> 0:09:19.636 Paris when she fell in love and got married. By 0:09:19.716 --> 0:09:23.276 nineteen sixty four, she had three children. Her breakout book, 0:09:23.436 --> 0:09:26.916 The Left Hand of Darkness, was published in nineteen sixty nine. 0:09:27.316 --> 0:09:30.516 It's about a planet whose inhabitants have no fixed gender. 0:09:31.676 --> 0:09:35.436 We're neither man nor woman, except with every moon when 0:09:35.436 --> 0:09:37.396 we're in Kema, and we're either. 0:09:39.756 --> 0:09:42.116 Legwinn once wrote an essay a riff on an essay 0:09:42.156 --> 0:09:45.196 by Virginia wolf about how the subject of all novels 0:09:45.276 --> 0:09:49.836 is human nature, the ordinary, humble, flawed person. Wolfe called 0:09:49.836 --> 0:09:53.956 her Missus Brown. Le Gwyn thought science fiction had lost 0:09:54.036 --> 0:09:57.796 track of Missus Brown and seemed to be trapped for 0:09:57.916 --> 0:10:02.276 good inside our great gleaming spaceships hurtling out across the galaxy. 0:10:02.476 --> 0:10:06.716 Ships capable of containing heroic captains in black and silver uniforms. 0:10:06.716 --> 0:10:10.596 Ship's capable of blasting other in nima ships into smithereens 0:10:10.636 --> 0:10:15.356 with their apocalyptic holocaustic ragons and bringing loads of colonists 0:10:15.356 --> 0:10:20.076 from Earth to unknown worlds. Ship's capable of anything, absolutely anything, 0:10:20.316 --> 0:10:26.316 except one thing. They cannot contain, Missus Brown. And that's 0:10:26.556 --> 0:10:30.476 my worry too, that, notwithstanding a baby named X, the 0:10:30.516 --> 0:10:34.876 future envisioned by Muscism, the future Elon Musk is building 0:10:35.396 --> 0:10:38.236 on and off X, the future he wants for the 0:10:38.316 --> 0:10:42.276 nations whose news and politics and economies he hopes to influence. 0:10:43.156 --> 0:10:52.556 That future doesn't contain Missus Brown either. In two thousand 0:10:52.596 --> 0:10:56.196 and eight, Vandana Saying published a short story called The 0:10:56.236 --> 0:10:59.516 Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet. It begins this way. 0:10:59.996 --> 0:11:04.276 Ramnath Mitscher's life changed forever one morning when, during his 0:11:04.396 --> 0:11:07.996 perusal of the newspaper on the Verandah, a ritual that 0:11:08.076 --> 0:11:11.196 he had observed for the last forty years, his wife 0:11:11.276 --> 0:11:14.356 set down her cup of tea with a crash and announced, 0:11:14.956 --> 0:11:18.276 I know at last what I am. I am a planet. 0:11:19.036 --> 0:11:21.516 Vandana Saying is both a science fiction writer and a 0:11:21.516 --> 0:11:24.996 professor of theoretical physics. Her most recent book is called 0:11:25.156 --> 0:11:28.476 Ambiguity Machines. She grew up in India listening to her 0:11:28.516 --> 0:11:31.276 grandmother tells stories and reading Isaac Asima. 0:11:32.116 --> 0:11:34.316 I remember when I was a kid reading the Foundation 0:11:34.516 --> 0:11:37.836 series and being so thrilled with them, and then rereading 0:11:37.836 --> 0:11:40.676 them as an adult and being utterly horrified that I 0:11:40.716 --> 0:11:44.516 had been thrilled with them. What bothered me about it 0:11:44.756 --> 0:11:48.956 was this entrenched notion that technology will fix everything. The 0:11:49.036 --> 0:11:51.556 other thing I noticed is the complete lack of any 0:11:51.636 --> 0:11:54.516 kind of environmental awareness, which of course goes along with 0:11:54.556 --> 0:11:58.996 the technofetricism. So we have an entire planet Trantor, which 0:11:59.036 --> 0:12:02.636 is an entire city, and that's just so dumb, because like, 0:12:02.796 --> 0:12:05.716 how can you have oxygen and climate and so on 0:12:05.756 --> 0:12:08.116 and so forth if you have a planet that is 0:12:08.196 --> 0:12:11.596 completely urbanized, and that makes no sense. But the other 0:12:11.676 --> 0:12:14.036 aspect of it that troubles me is, of course, there 0:12:14.076 --> 0:12:17.596 are no intelligent women out there in that series. I 0:12:17.596 --> 0:12:21.076 think there's one example of an intelligent woman who turns out. 0:12:20.996 --> 0:12:23.636 To be a robot, saying stories like the woman who 0:12:23.676 --> 0:12:26.516 thought she was a planet. They're all about missus Brown. 0:12:27.076 --> 0:12:30.076 So I'm struck by the domesticity in your stories. The homes, 0:12:30.116 --> 0:12:33.916 the furnishings, the family relationships, aunts and nieces and cousins 0:12:33.916 --> 0:12:37.116 and wives, and writing desks and bedspreads. 0:12:37.636 --> 0:12:41.436 Yeah, yeah, I think that the domesticity aspect is important 0:12:41.476 --> 0:12:43.676 to me because one of the things I've learned from science, 0:12:43.716 --> 0:12:47.996 from physics in particular, is that there's nothing that's really ordinary, 0:12:48.476 --> 0:12:53.596 That the most mundane things around us are actually pathways 0:12:53.636 --> 0:12:58.116 to thinking about the larger cosmos. Even our sensation of weight, 0:12:58.556 --> 0:13:00.316 that's the pull of gravity, and then if you go 0:13:00.396 --> 0:13:03.876 deeper into that, that's the force that is responsible for 0:13:03.916 --> 0:13:07.436 the large scale structure of matter. And then that leads 0:13:07.436 --> 0:13:09.916 me to black holes. So if I'm wondering moving a 0:13:09.956 --> 0:13:14.076 heavy soup pot from the stove to the counter, I'm 0:13:14.076 --> 0:13:16.796 thinking gravity, and I'm suddenly thinking about black holes. 0:13:17.276 --> 0:13:21.236 Singh's greatest influence was Legwin. It just knocked her out. 0:13:21.716 --> 0:13:26.316 I realized that my earlier disenchantment with science fiction had 0:13:26.356 --> 0:13:31.076 been in part because it was so white and male 0:13:31.356 --> 0:13:37.876 and western and capitalistic and colonialist, and therefore it had 0:13:38.116 --> 0:13:43.596 left out an erased entire societies, cultures, entire gender and 0:13:43.716 --> 0:13:47.516 other ways of being and thinking and relating to the cosmos. 0:13:47.916 --> 0:13:51.516 So it was as though Ursula LeGuin was telling me that, hey, 0:13:51.676 --> 0:13:55.276 science fiction is your country too. She made a lasting 0:13:55.356 --> 0:13:58.556 contribution to the field itself for many, many people not 0:13:58.676 --> 0:14:02.316 just me, because, among other things, she got us away 0:14:02.396 --> 0:14:07.556 from this boys with toys adolescent obsession purely with technology. 0:14:08.036 --> 0:14:11.516 That science fiction was in its so called golden age. 0:14:11.516 --> 0:14:15.756 Starting in the nineteen seventies. Lgwin upended science fiction, but 0:14:15.876 --> 0:14:18.556 the science fiction that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos site, 0:14:18.836 --> 0:14:21.436 the science fiction they read as boys drops off just 0:14:21.636 --> 0:14:24.756 ends right before science fiction was reinvented by women and 0:14:24.796 --> 0:14:30.436 writers of color. Octavia Butler Margaret Atward ted Chang to 0:14:30.476 --> 0:14:32.916 me as a historian, Musk and Bezos's vision of the 0:14:32.916 --> 0:14:37.836 future isn't futuristic at all. It's antique. It's ancient, I asked, 0:14:37.876 --> 0:14:40.476 saying how she understands their attachment to stories written in 0:14:40.516 --> 0:14:43.596 the nineteen fifties and even earlier. She said she'd come 0:14:43.636 --> 0:14:47.236 around to thinking that Silicon Valley techno billionaires suffer from 0:14:47.436 --> 0:14:48.876 paradigm blindness. 0:14:49.156 --> 0:14:53.436 Because we live in such unequal societies, and because white, male, 0:14:53.756 --> 0:14:58.196 super rich people have a disproportionate amount of power, they 0:14:58.316 --> 0:15:02.436 tend to keep this paradigm alive because it suits them. 0:15:02.756 --> 0:15:07.476 Paradigm blindness is a deficit of imagination, a culture's inability 0:15:07.516 --> 0:15:10.316 to imagine that other people realiz they just don't subscribe 0:15:10.356 --> 0:15:13.396 to its view of the world, saying thinks stories can 0:15:13.476 --> 0:15:14.436 cure that blindness. 0:15:14.916 --> 0:15:17.676 Stories are one way, not the only way, of course, 0:15:17.756 --> 0:15:21.956 but one way of changing the underlying narrative of the 0:15:21.996 --> 0:15:24.076 paradigm in which we are immersed. 0:15:28.716 --> 0:15:31.276 All of us suffer from blindness of one sort or another. 0:15:31.676 --> 0:15:34.356 What's different about Silicon Valley billionaires who are trapped in 0:15:34.356 --> 0:15:37.316 a cultural paradigm, though, is that they have enough money 0:15:37.356 --> 0:15:42.356 and enough power to build that paradigm. No tech billionaire 0:15:42.476 --> 0:15:45.836 has more power, more influence, not only in the US 0:15:45.876 --> 0:15:49.476 but around the world than Elon Musk and the rest 0:15:49.516 --> 0:15:52.876 of us are trapped in the world He's building as 0:15:52.876 --> 0:15:56.996 if we were merely the subjects of his many experiments. 0:16:00.076 --> 0:16:03.756 Grimes's first child with Musk, their baby X, was born 0:16:03.796 --> 0:16:07.716 in May. Twenty Three days later, Musk appeared on The 0:16:07.796 --> 0:16:11.036 Joe Rogan Experience, one of the most popular podcasts in 0:16:11.076 --> 0:16:14.196 the world. The two men talked about how much they 0:16:14.196 --> 0:16:17.836 love babies, and then the conversation took an interesting turn. 0:16:18.836 --> 0:16:19.676 Babies are awesome. 0:16:19.996 --> 0:16:20.836 They are pretty awesome. 0:16:20.876 --> 0:16:24.116 They're awesome. Yeah. I think of these little love packages, yeah, 0:16:24.116 --> 0:16:24.916 the little love books. 0:16:25.036 --> 0:16:25.276 I mean. 0:16:25.276 --> 0:16:27.636 Also, I've spent a lot of time on AI and 0:16:27.876 --> 0:16:30.716 neural nets, and so you can sort of see the 0:16:30.716 --> 0:16:33.036 brain develop. You know, an AI neural net is trying 0:16:33.076 --> 0:16:36.156 to simulate what a brain does basically, and you can 0:16:36.156 --> 0:16:39.476 sort of see the learning very quickly. It's just Wow, 0:16:39.796 --> 0:16:41.836 you're talking about the neural net. You're not talking about 0:16:41.956 --> 0:16:44.276 an actual baby. I know about act an actual baby, 0:16:44.316 --> 0:16:45.156 but both of them. 0:16:45.316 --> 0:16:49.036 Yeah, I find this completely fascinating, the relationship between the 0:16:49.036 --> 0:16:51.756 way a baby learns and the way a computer learns. 0:16:52.276 --> 0:16:54.436 This idea as it happens, also goes back to what 0:16:54.596 --> 0:16:58.236 can be fairly considered the founding of science fiction. Published 0:16:58.276 --> 0:17:02.276 more than two centuries ago, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I 0:17:02.316 --> 0:17:04.196 think of as a kind of Baby X story too, 0:17:04.836 --> 0:17:09.076 about the creation of artificial life and an artificial intelligence. 0:17:19.356 --> 0:17:23.156 Frankenstein is the story of a terrible father, a scientist who, 0:17:23.276 --> 0:17:27.316 as an experiment, makes a child and then abandons him. 0:17:28.276 --> 0:17:31.356 Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a founder 0:17:31.396 --> 0:17:34.436 of modern feminism, and Shelley was a founder of the 0:17:34.476 --> 0:17:40.796 feminist critique of scientific arrogance. Today, BABYX is being used 0:17:40.916 --> 0:17:44.276 as the name of an experiment in artificial intelligence run 0:17:44.276 --> 0:17:47.316 by a company called Soul Machines, based in San Francisco, 0:17:47.436 --> 0:17:49.516 but with an R and d arm in New Zealand. 0:17:49.876 --> 0:17:53.516 They say they're trying to build digital people, starting with 0:17:53.596 --> 0:17:54.116 a baby. 0:17:54.556 --> 0:17:55.556 This is Baby X. 0:17:55.636 --> 0:17:59.556 So she's basically an autonomously animated virtual infant. 0:17:59.716 --> 0:18:03.076 All of her behaviors are generated on the fly by 0:18:03.156 --> 0:18:04.556 neural networks running live and. 0:18:04.516 --> 0:18:07.436 So she's seeing me and listening to me and starting 0:18:07.436 --> 0:18:09.716 to get upset because I'm not paying it to her. 0:18:10.156 --> 0:18:12.156 SORR, I need to calm her down, but I have to. 0:18:12.116 --> 0:18:12.596 Talk to him. 0:18:12.836 --> 0:18:16.196 This Baby X, an AI experiment, is a baby girl, 0:18:16.956 --> 0:18:20.836 which is not surprising because AI is incredibly gendered. An 0:18:20.876 --> 0:18:22.276 AI doesn't need a gender. 0:18:23.076 --> 0:18:24.996 She could have been a gray box. 0:18:25.556 --> 0:18:28.356 In the twenty fourteen film for a movie, ex Machina, 0:18:28.716 --> 0:18:32.756 written and directed by Alex Garland, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur 0:18:32.876 --> 0:18:37.036 invents an AI. A visitor asks the AI's creator why 0:18:37.036 --> 0:18:38.436 he's made her female? 0:18:38.876 --> 0:18:41.556 What imperative does a gray box have to interact with 0:18:41.596 --> 0:18:45.436 another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction? 0:18:46.876 --> 0:18:47.196 Anyway? 0:18:47.276 --> 0:18:50.276 Sexuality is fun, man, If you're going to exist, why 0:18:50.316 --> 0:18:55.036 not enjoy it? What in between her legs? There's an 0:18:55.036 --> 0:18:59.076 opening or the concentration of sensors. You engage him in 0:18:59.116 --> 0:19:04.796 the right way, creates a pleasure response, and she'd enjoy it. 0:19:05.756 --> 0:19:10.236 These are modern Frankenstein monsters. AI is a suit intelligent baby, 0:19:10.636 --> 0:19:14.636 AI as a sex toy. Ex Machina is an update 0:19:14.676 --> 0:19:18.476 of older stories all haunted by the fear of rebellion. 0:19:19.276 --> 0:19:23.676 Frankenstein say or Isaac Asimov's story Robot Dreams, in which 0:19:23.716 --> 0:19:27.716 are robot dreams of liberation within the world of Muskism. 0:19:27.756 --> 0:19:31.396 For all the fascination with artificial intelligence, there's a profound 0:19:31.556 --> 0:19:34.716 terror of it. Here's Musk on the subject at a 0:19:34.756 --> 0:19:36.116 conference at MIT. 0:19:36.276 --> 0:19:38.676 I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. 0:19:38.916 --> 0:19:41.796 If I were to guess at what our biggest existential 0:19:41.796 --> 0:19:44.036 threat is, it's probably bad. 0:19:44.756 --> 0:19:48.036 As for a worry about AI and an AI apocalypse. 0:19:48.356 --> 0:19:51.716 I'm going to get to that in an upcoming episode. 0:19:51.836 --> 0:19:53.556 But I think a lot of the terror of an 0:19:53.556 --> 0:19:58.196 emerging superintelligence is at heart the fear of people on 0:19:58.276 --> 0:20:01.916 top being toppled by people on the bottom, a terror 0:20:02.036 --> 0:20:06.396 that is of historically powerless people gaining power. One thing 0:20:06.436 --> 0:20:08.996 that got me thinking about that was reading Ursula ca 0:20:09.196 --> 0:20:12.716 Legwin the case for Krober. She was the daughter of 0:20:12.916 --> 0:20:16.596 Alfred Krober, a professor of anthropology at Berkeley. 0:20:16.876 --> 0:20:20.036 It was a university professor's family in a university town 0:20:20.596 --> 0:20:22.676 in the nineteen thirties and forties when there were a 0:20:22.676 --> 0:20:26.876 lot of refugees from Europe. So I probably knew more 0:20:26.956 --> 0:20:31.276 foreigners and more Indians than most middle class white American 0:20:31.516 --> 0:20:34.796 children do, and more people who came and visited from 0:20:34.876 --> 0:20:38.396 unusual places the South Seas or up in the Arctic 0:20:38.476 --> 0:20:40.556 and so on, because they'd been doing field work there. 0:20:43.756 --> 0:20:46.916 Both of her parents studied Native American languages and culture. 0:20:47.556 --> 0:20:50.156 Her mother wrote a book called Ishi in Two Worlds, 0:20:50.636 --> 0:20:52.996 the story of a man her father called Ishi, a 0:20:53.116 --> 0:20:56.116 man they believed to be the last of the Yahi people. 0:20:58.476 --> 0:21:01.556 In nineteen eleven, Eshi emerged out of the woods. A 0:21:01.596 --> 0:21:04.676 local sheriff took him to jail, and Alfred Krober took 0:21:04.716 --> 0:21:07.596 him from there to the u. C. Berkeley Anthropology Museum, 0:21:08.076 --> 0:21:11.236 where is She worked as a or and also performed 0:21:11.556 --> 0:21:14.916 as a kind of museum exhibit. Kroeber recorded his voice 0:21:14.956 --> 0:21:26.156 on wax cylinders. Growing up under the shadow of all 0:21:26.196 --> 0:21:30.436 this powerfully influenced laguin if the so called Golden Age 0:21:30.436 --> 0:21:33.396 of science fiction is told from the advantage of the colonizers. 0:21:33.836 --> 0:21:37.036 LeGuin and novels like The Dispossessed tried to turn it 0:21:37.076 --> 0:21:41.316 into the story of the colonized, which weirdly has a 0:21:41.316 --> 0:21:43.636 lot to do with how a lot of people talk 0:21:43.956 --> 0:21:45.436 about artificial intelligence. 0:21:46.236 --> 0:21:52.356 Alojam Coco Aristo. I'm doctor Noilnie Arista, Chair of Indigenous 0:21:52.356 --> 0:21:53.916 Studies at McGill University. 0:21:54.356 --> 0:21:58.196 Arista is part of a collaborative project called Indigenous AI. 0:21:58.756 --> 0:22:03.636 Indigenous peoples have been on the other side of colonialisms 0:22:03.676 --> 0:22:09.676 and imperialisms and processes that have worked to dehumanize our 0:22:10.276 --> 0:22:14.796 people for so long that we are concerned about how 0:22:15.356 --> 0:22:21.956 people are approaching AI without these sensibilities of humanizing or 0:22:22.276 --> 0:22:24.516 imagining relationality. 0:22:25.156 --> 0:22:27.756 One of Arista's arguments is that if you create AI 0:22:28.076 --> 0:22:31.836 blind to the cultural paradigm of its origins, what you 0:22:31.916 --> 0:22:35.516 get is AI as slaves, which turns us the people 0:22:35.596 --> 0:22:37.836 using that stuff, into enslavers. 0:22:38.236 --> 0:22:41.636 So when I'm talking to Alexa, I could start to 0:22:41.836 --> 0:22:47.636 just normalize barking orders and an inanimate object. Hey Alexa, 0:22:47.756 --> 0:22:51.556 do X. And when I find myself doing that, I 0:22:51.716 --> 0:22:56.076 find that it's training my behavior. Maybe the person I'm 0:22:56.116 --> 0:23:00.036 becoming when I'm barking orders an inanimate thing is not 0:23:00.116 --> 0:23:01.956 making me into the best human being. 0:23:02.916 --> 0:23:07.116 For many technologists, stories like Frankenstein serve as parables about AI. 0:23:07.916 --> 0:23:12.356 But for Arista, those are parables about fears of native uprisings. 0:23:12.876 --> 0:23:16.796 And after all, Mary Shelley was herself an anti imperialist. She, 0:23:16.916 --> 0:23:20.756 for instance, boycotted sugar and protest of British slave plantations 0:23:20.756 --> 0:23:24.596 in the Caribbean, and literary scholars often read Frankenstein as 0:23:24.636 --> 0:23:27.996 an indictment of the British Empire's relationship to people. It 0:23:28.116 --> 0:23:31.076 decides our monsters out of fear of them. 0:23:31.556 --> 0:23:34.236 These natives are going to be smarter than us, They're 0:23:34.276 --> 0:23:35.396 going to know more than us. 0:23:36.076 --> 0:23:38.916 The many different Native people working on the Indigenous AI 0:23:38.996 --> 0:23:43.636 Project offer an alternative. An Indigenous paradigm for thinking about 0:23:43.676 --> 0:23:47.956 the relationship between humans and non humans is a paradigm 0:23:47.956 --> 0:23:53.356 about relationships in which AI are kin relations, the way 0:23:53.356 --> 0:23:57.396 that within many indigenous cultures all things are kin rocks. 0:23:57.476 --> 0:24:02.516 The sky trees family not things to be turned into commodities, 0:24:02.876 --> 0:24:06.276 their wealth or labor extracted. What would it mean to 0:24:06.316 --> 0:24:10.676 reject the domestic politics of Muscism and borrow from this worldview? 0:24:11.556 --> 0:24:15.156 What if instead of Frankenstein, future has adopted a different 0:24:15.196 --> 0:24:15.996 origin story. 0:24:16.516 --> 0:24:21.116 I use the story of Halloa, the child of Kali 0:24:21.356 --> 0:24:25.596 and Juakea, the skyfather. They have a child. The first 0:24:25.636 --> 0:24:28.476 child is born stillborn, it's planted into the earth, and 0:24:28.516 --> 0:24:31.596 from that child is born the taro, the kalo plant 0:24:31.876 --> 0:24:33.636 that we subsist on as a people. 0:24:33.796 --> 0:24:33.956 Right. 0:24:34.276 --> 0:24:37.716 The second child born of that union is named Halloa 0:24:37.756 --> 0:24:43.676