Ha!

I’m actually not a techno-optimist, tbh! But I also think we’re failing to make sure we build a scenario in which AI/ML can do the most good by leaving those with the least humane vision of the future in charge of the thing.

(Of course now, 80 years later, India produces the most cotton, most of it hand-picked, over 90% by women, because we again fail to see the Good in reducing women’s labor, particular women of color)

so white inventors didn’t conceive of a broad Good coming from not obliging Black labor—only abolitionists thought a world without slavery was an inherently better world

Why? In part because they didn’t invent a machine to pick the stupid cotton until the 1940s, in larger part because they simply didn’t think of Black people as People

For example, the cotton gin radically *reduced* human labor. That should have been great! But it made cotton so profitable that the South massively increased its use of slavery, to the point of a reverse migration (Northern Black folk kidnapped and sold to the South in huge numbers)

That said? There are definitely techno-fascists annoyingly vocal at the helm of many AI/ML efforts right now! And a lot of crushing artists (and vulnerable populations of all sorts) under the boot of Progress. I think that says more about our cultural values than the tech itself, tbh.

I can’t get to 100 there. Very similar things were said of earlier tech, century over century (maybe not “fascist” but we had strong feelings about mass production factories, etc). At each turn, concern that shifts in tech & their impacts on labor would make us “less human.”

Biographies are a very different art than other lit… true character studies usually only possible once the person is dead.

He was always the guy who felt these things. And no one freakin’ called her “Rosie.”

See, I think overemphasizing his scientific contributions does two things: it reinforces the hero’s journey “eureka” story about science (which does harm: all achievements are collaborative and situated in a broader community) and it pretends the last 20 years are a “turn” instead of a reveal.

Note that for all his flaws (so many), Oz actually responds like a physician—goes immediately to the guy’s aid, no hesitation.

This is true even of how we begin to change our lives. We smell the unknown earth. The must of it. The feel of the air. There is, I mean, a relation to our future selves and what those selves will build well before any of it arrives, which compels us all on its own.

But this is true of every creative act. This is even true of new scientific research, before you craft hypothesis, before you even build your frames of inquiry.