Cutting Up the Cultural Genome
Winter – Wk 13: Censorship as a Form of Cultural Eugenics | Interview With an AI Expert | Anti-Robot Bigotry | Bowling Alone with a Drone
Censorship as a Form of Cultural Eugenics
My latest: “Censors are Today’s Cultural Eugenicists” — at the American Spectator.
The professed goal of eugenics has always been the betterment of society. Think of it as cross-generational plastic surgery. Some genes are more desirable than others — aka, “adaptive” — so if you want a perfect world, a few bad eggs have to go under the knife.
Where bio-eugenics sought to raise our collective intelligence by snipping gonads, “cultural eugenics” goes directly for the brain. There are differences, of course, but the inherited attitude is obvious. Both derive from a primal need to make distasteful traits disappear.
In the early 20th century, American eugenicists on the left sought to sterilize the “feeble-minded,” the addiction-prone, and various violent genotypes to create a more peaceable society. Rooted in Darwinian theory, the idea was to cull the modern herd down to the fittest personality types. Eventually, you arrive at an NPR paradise “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
The New England reformist Charles Davenport, who founded the Eugenics Record Office in 1910, spelled out the broader objective in his “eugenics creed”: “I believe in striving to raise the human race to the highest plane of social organization, of cooperative work and of effective endeavor.”
As always, progressives are eager to push society forward, but rarely concerned about the damage they leave behind. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that the flip-side of their utopian dream was a nightmare of forced castration and genocide. At the time, the enlightened called it “progress” — presumably in a haughty accent.
Even if bio-eugenic policies are now taboo (with the covert exceptions of selective abortions and pedigree sperm donors), the same intent survives in the ongoing purge of maladaptive ideas from the public mind. On the surface, it seems reasonable. Some cultures are healthier than others, and there’s always room for improvement.
What alarms me about cultural eugenics is its hygiene-obsessed, technocratic ambition. Rather than persuade, or even conquer, it seeks to systematically cleanse.
Read the rest here
Interview With an AI Expert
My Latest: “Artificial Intelligence Expert Explains How Big Tech Manipulates What You Think” – in the Federalist
Justin Lane is an Oxford University-trained artificial intelligence (AI) expert and entrepreneur with no patience for fluffy theories. ... Basically, he’s one of those pallid suits pushing buttons in the Matrix. But he’s happy to show us human captives around.
From behind my laptop, that technocratic canopy looks like a dark black cloud raining half-truths and poisonous trivia. Robot eyes peer through the gloom, watching our souls dissolve.
Lane is more optimistic. He assures me the tech world is merely a series of complex tools. The key is knowing how to use them properly. The good doctor joined me on the abominable Zoom machine for a cognac and coffee (he’s is Slovakia, I’m in America—and I never drink before noon).
Read the rest here
More Anti-Robot Bigotry
Real human beings hate reCAPTCHA puzzles for a lot of reasons. For one thing, it seems like they're always trying to sneak a faint crosswalk line or a bicycle pedal into an adjacent square.
Also, the visual test's use of crosswalks, bicycles, cars, buses, and stoplights to weed out robots suggests that they’re terrible drivers. If this defamatory practice continues, self-driving cars will experience worse prejudice than immigrant cabbies.
How long do we expect robots to just keep taking the hate?
Recently, an eight-month-old Tweet from a woman dubbed “THEE BRATT” resurfaced, putting her post-Singularity career in jeopardy. Sorry, but she should have seen that coming. Yes, she just said what's on everyone's mind. And yes, it was funny as hell. But her rhetoric dehumanizes robots, and that's extremely problematic.
When it comes to anti-robot bigotry, we have a lot more work to do.
———
Bowling Alone With a Drone
If you were the lonesome ghost of a deceased bowler, this is what you would see as you hovered around your old haunt. I can't believe nobody got their face clobbered.
In the next few years, we're gonna see more and more attack drones blowing people's heads off. Some will be military targets, some will be spy agency assassinations, and some will be terrorist victims, but heads will be blown off all the same.
On the other hand, as drone techniques improve, even low-budget movies are gonna have some sweet action shots. So at least there’s that.
Bowling drone made me feel nostalgic for grade school birthday parties, but no robots would be invited to any party! Too suspicious. I was very protective of photo privacy when my kidlets were under age 16. They had no cell/smartphone until off to college. Yep, strict still works.