March 29, 2025 • 27 mins
The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk adore concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful, immensely rich men colonize other planets. In this episode, Jill Lepore looks at some of the science fiction that’s usually left out of this vision — science fiction by and about women.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Americans do this really weird thing. Expectant parents hold gender
reveal parties.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Now to the mystery explosion that rocked a southern New
Hampshire town.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
They often feature explosions with smoke that's either pink or blue.
An alarming number of these stunts have gone ry.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Turns out that blast came from an over the top
gender reveal party, a couple apparently using explosives to announce
the sex of their baby.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
People have been killed, houses have burned to the ground,
even forests.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
We begin tonight with new video released from the US
fourst Service showing the moment a gender reveal video started
the forty seven thousand acre sawmill fire.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
For their first baby. Elon Musk and his then girlfriend,
the musician Grimes didn't hold a gender reveal party in
a way. They did the opposite. In twenty twenty, on Twitter,
they announced the birth of a baby named X. Grimes
said the baby would be raised without a gender. Like
most things involving Musk, this idea has ties to science fiction.
Speaker 5 (01:33):
Once upon a time, a baby named X was born.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
The story of Baby X was published in nineteen seventy
two in Miss, a feminist magazine. During its very first year,
at the height of the women's liberation movement.
Speaker 5 (01:46):
This baby was named X so that nobody could tell
whether it was a boy or a girl. Its parents
could tell, of course, but they couldn't tell anybody else.
They couldn't even tell Baby X, at least not until
much much later. You see, it was all part of
a very important secret scientific X known officially as Project
(02:11):
Baby X.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Baby X began as a feminist thought experiment. How did
it come to be the name of Elon Musk's youngest child?
In a broader sense, what's the place of ideas about
families in Silicon Valley futurism? And are there other ideas
about families that maybe ought to have a place in
any vision of the future. Welcome to X Man, the
(02:41):
Elon Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian,
a professor at Harvard, and for a long time I've
been studying the relationship between technological and political change. This series,
I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism. Call it Muskism.
Extravagant extreme capitalism. Extraterrestrial capitalism. Were stock prices for projects
(03:03):
from Tesla and SpaceX to cryptocurrencies and neural implants can
be driven by fantasies that come from science fiction. I'm
fascinated by science fiction, even by comic books. They once
wrote a whole book of political history of Wonder Woman.
The science fiction men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezosidor
(03:24):
generally concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful and often
immensely rich men colonize other planets. This episode, which is
called Baby X, I want to take a look at
the science fiction that's usually left out of that vision,
new wave afrofuturism, feminist science fiction, postcolonial science fiction, including
(03:47):
the story of Baby X.
Speaker 5 (03:50):
The smartest scientists had set up this experiment at a
cost of exactly twenty three billion dollars and seventy two cents.
This might seem like a lot for one baby, even
if it was an important, secret scientific experimental Baby.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
This sort of science fiction generally involves both ideas about
gender and sexuality and actual people who are not men,
women and children, babies. Even I think it can help
explain the domestic politics of Muskism. This Elon Musk origin
story starts back at the beginning of this century. Elon
(04:27):
Musk met his first wife, the Canadian writer Justine Wilson,
in college. They married in the year two thousand and
had a baby who died tragically, and then triplets and twins.
After the marriage ended, Wilson wrote an essay called I
Was a Starter Wife for Marie Claire, a women's magazine,
about how weeks after Musk filed for divorce he texted her.
(04:47):
She wrote to say he was engaged to a gorgeous
British actress in her early twenties. Musk and that actress married, divorced, remarried,
and then divorced again in twenty sixteen. In twenty eighteen,
Musk met Claire Bouchet, an innovative Canadian born musician known
as Grimes. She'd studied neuroscience at McGill. Like Musk, Grimes
(05:10):
is an avid science fiction fan. Her first album was
a tribute to Doune. The New Yorker once called her
a mad pop scientist. Being Musk's girlfriend and doing things
like defending him against charges that he prevented Tesla workers
from unionizing annoyed a lot of her fans. She was
(05:31):
attacked with the particular venom reserved for female artists and writers.
Grimes has got a sophisticated interest in gender and voice.
Speaker 6 (05:40):
Hey everybody, this is Grimes and I'm very excited to
be here kicking off my brand new six month residency
for BBC Radio One.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
After she got pregnant, she hosted.
Speaker 6 (05:50):
A radio show and the theme is sci Fi Baby
or Weird Science Fiction and Electronic Music for Babies.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
A few months later, in May of twenty twenty, announcing
their baby's birth, Musk said it was a boy, but
Grimes declined to mention its gender and tweeted, I don't
want to gender them in case that's not how they
feel in their life. At the time, this looked like
another example of so called gender neutral parenting, which had
recently had some uptake among people, including celebrities, who believed
(06:22):
children should get the opportunity to decide their own gender identity.
In twenty eleven, when Grimes was at McGill, there'd been
a lot of coverage of a family in Canada.
Speaker 7 (06:32):
Well is a couple in Toronto that is creating quite
a stir right now because they're raising their baby what
they're calling gender free.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
This all seems very twenty first century, born out of
the heated contemporary culture war over trans writes, but it's
also very nineteen seventies and second wave feminist.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
It's an X was absolutely all they would tell anyone,
and that make the friends and relatives very angry.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
The story of Baby X from nineteen seventy two was
written by Lois Gould, a novelist and mother of two boys,
who was also an editor of Ladies Home Journal and
a columnist for the New York Times, where she wrote
the Hers Caumn. At the time Gold was writing, a
lot of feminists had been arguing that kids should be
able to wear whatever clothes they want and play with
whatever toys they want, not just pants and trucks for
(07:18):
boys and dresses and dolls for girls.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
So they bought plenty of sturdy blue pajamas in the
boys department and cheerful flowered underwear in the girls department,
and they bought all kinds of toys. The head scientists
of Project Baby X checked all their purchases and told
them to keep up the good work.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
In nineteen seventy five, Baby X, the feminist fable, led
to an actual scientific experiment whose results were published in
a journal article that was also called Baby X.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Although the story was science fiction fantasy. The question of
how adults would actually respond to a child appeared to
merit investigation.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Forty two volunteers, mostly graduate students at the City University
of New York, were put in a lab with a
baby under different conditions.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
Those in the male and female conditions were told that
there was a three month old baby boy or baby
girl to play with, while those in the neutral condition
were told that there was a three month old baby
with no mention of its sex or name.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Unsurprisingly, the volunteers interacted differently with the baby, depending on
whether they'd been told it was a boy or a
girl or just a baby. But the sort of experiment
has other origins too, especially in the work of one
of the most influential science fiction writers of the last century,
Ursula k Legwin, who on BBC Radio four introduced herself
(08:40):
this way.
Speaker 8 (08:41):
I am a man. Now you may think I've made
some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that
I'm trying to fool you, because my first name ends
in A, and I own three bras, and I've been
pregnant five times. When I was born, there actually were
only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun
(09:01):
his pronoun I'm the generic he as in, if anybody
needs an abortion, he will have to go to another state.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Legwin was born in California in nineteen twenty nine. In
the nineteen fifties, she was studying for a PhD in
Paris when she fell in love and got married. By
nineteen sixty four, she had three children. Her breakout book,
The Left Hand of Darkness, was published in nineteen sixty nine.
It's about a planet whose inhabitants have no fixed gender.
Speaker 7 (09:31):
We're neither man nor woman, except with every moon when
we're in Kema, and we're either.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Legwinn once wrote an essay a riff on an essay
by Virginia wolf about how the subject of all novels
is human nature, the ordinary, humble, flawed person. Wolfe called
her Missus Brown. Le Gwyn thought science fiction had lost
track of Missus Brown and seemed to be trapped for
good inside our great gleaming spaceships hurtling out across the galaxy.
(10:02):
Ships capable of containing heroic captains in black and silver uniforms.
Ship's capable of blasting other in nima ships into smithereens
with their apocalyptic holocaustic ragons and bringing loads of colonists
from Earth to unknown worlds. Ship's capable of anything, absolutely anything,
except one thing. They cannot contain, Missus Brown. And that's
(10:26):
my worry too, that, notwithstanding a baby named X, the
future envisioned by Muscism, the future Elon Musk is building
on and off X, the future he wants for the
nations whose news and politics and economies he hopes to influence.
That future doesn't contain Missus Brown either. In two thousand
(10:52):
and eight, Vandana Saying published a short story called The
Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet. It begins this way.
Speaker 9 (10:59):
Ramnath Mitscher's life changed forever one morning when, during his
perusal of the newspaper on the Verandah, a ritual that
he had observed for the last forty years, his wife
set down her cup of tea with a crash and announced,
I know at last what I am. I am a planet.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Vandana Saying is both a science fiction writer and a
professor of theoretical physics. Her most recent book is called
Ambiguity Machines. She grew up in India listening to her
grandmother tells stories and reading Isaac Asima.
Speaker 9 (11:32):
I remember when I was a kid reading the Foundation
series and being so thrilled with them, and then rereading
them as an adult and being utterly horrified that I
had been thrilled with them. What bothered me about it
was this entrenched notion that technology will fix everything. The
other thing I noticed is the complete lack of any
kind of environmental awareness, which of course goes along with
(11:54):
the technofetricism. So we have an entire planet Trantor, which
is an entire city, and that's just so dumb, because like,
how can you have oxygen and climate and so on
and so forth if you have a planet that is
completely urbanized, and that makes no sense. But the other
aspect of it that troubles me is, of course, there
are no intelligent women out there in that series. I
(12:17):
think there's one example of an intelligent woman who turns out.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
To be a robot, saying stories like the woman who
thought she was a planet. They're all about missus Brown.
So I'm struck by the domesticity in your stories. The homes,
the furnishings, the family relationships, aunts and nieces and cousins
and wives, and writing desks and bedspreads.
Speaker 9 (12:37):
Yeah, yeah, I think that the domesticity aspect is important
to me because one of the things I've learned from science,
from physics in particular, is that there's nothing that's really ordinary,
That the most mundane things around us are actually pathways
to thinking about the larger cosmos. Even our sensation of weight,
(12:58):
that's the pull of gravity, and then if you go
deeper into that, that's the force that is responsible for
the large scale structure of matter. And then that leads
me to black holes. So if I'm wondering moving a
heavy soup pot from the stove to the counter, I'm
thinking gravity, and I'm suddenly thinking about black holes.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Singh's greatest influence was Legwin. It just knocked her out.
Speaker 9 (13:21):
I realized that my earlier disenchantment with science fiction had
been in part because it was so white and male
and western and capitalistic and colonialist, and therefore it had
left out an erased entire societies, cultures, entire gender and
(13:43):
other ways of being and thinking and relating to the cosmos.
So it was as though Ursula LeGuin was telling me that, hey,
science fiction is your country too. She made a lasting
contribution to the field itself for many, many people not
just me, because, among other things, she got us away
from this boys with toys adolescent obsession purely with technology.
(14:08):
That science fiction was in its so called golden age.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Starting in the nineteen seventies. Lgwin upended science fiction, but
the science fiction that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos site,
the science fiction they read as boys drops off just
ends right before science fiction was reinvented by women and
writers of color. Octavia Butler Margaret Atward ted Chang to
me as a historian, Musk and Bezos's vision of the
(14:32):
future isn't futuristic at all. It's antique. It's ancient, I asked,
saying how she understands their attachment to stories written in
the nineteen fifties and even earlier. She said she'd come
around to thinking that Silicon Valley techno billionaires suffer from
paradigm blindness.
Speaker 9 (14:49):
Because we live in such unequal societies, and because white, male,
super rich people have a disproportionate amount of power, they
tend to keep this paradigm alive because it suits them.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Paradigm blindness is a deficit of imagination, a culture's inability
to imagine that other people realiz they just don't subscribe
to its view of the world, saying thinks stories can
cure that blindness.
Speaker 9 (15:14):
Stories are one way, not the only way, of course,
but one way of changing the underlying narrative of the
paradigm in which we are immersed.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
All of us suffer from blindness of one sort or another.
What's different about Silicon Valley billionaires who are trapped in
a cultural paradigm, though, is that they have enough money
and enough power to build that paradigm. No tech billionaire
has more power, more influence, not only in the US
but around the world than Elon Musk and the rest
(15:49):
of us are trapped in the world He's building as
if we were merely the subjects of his many experiments.
Grimes's first child with Musk, their baby X, was born
in May. Twenty Three days later, Musk appeared on The
Joe Rogan Experience, one of the most popular podcasts in
(16:11):
the world. The two men talked about how much they
love babies, and then the conversation took an interesting turn.
Speaker 7 (16:18):
Babies are awesome.
Speaker 10 (16:19):
They are pretty awesome.
Speaker 7 (16:20):
They're awesome. Yeah. I think of these little love packages, yeah,
the little love books.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
I mean.
Speaker 7 (16:25):
Also, I've spent a lot of time on AI and
neural nets, and so you can sort of see the
brain develop. You know, an AI neural net is trying
to simulate what a brain does basically, and you can
sort of see the learning very quickly. It's just Wow,
you're talking about the neural net. You're not talking about
an actual baby. I know about act an actual baby,
but both of them.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, I find this completely fascinating, the relationship between the
way a baby learns and the way a computer learns.
This idea as it happens, also goes back to what
can be fairly considered the founding of science fiction. Published
more than two centuries ago, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I
think of as a kind of Baby X story too,
about the creation of artificial life and an artificial intelligence.
(17:19):
Frankenstein is the story of a terrible father, a scientist who,
as an experiment, makes a child and then abandons him.
Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a founder
of modern feminism, and Shelley was a founder of the
feminist critique of scientific arrogance. Today, BABYX is being used
(17:40):
as the name of an experiment in artificial intelligence run
by a company called Soul Machines, based in San Francisco,
but with an R and d arm in New Zealand.
They say they're trying to build digital people, starting with
a baby.
Speaker 7 (17:54):
This is Baby X.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
So she's basically an autonomously animated virtual infant.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
All of her behaviors are generated on the fly by
neural networks running live and.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
So she's seeing me and listening to me and starting
to get upset because I'm not paying it to her.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
SORR, I need to calm her down, but I have to.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Talk to him.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
This Baby X, an AI experiment, is a baby girl,
which is not surprising because AI is incredibly gendered. An
AI doesn't need a gender.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
She could have been a gray box.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
In the twenty fourteen film for a movie, ex Machina,
written and directed by Alex Garland, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur
invents an AI. A visitor asks the AI's creator why
he's made her female?
Speaker 1 (18:38):
What imperative does a gray box have to interact with
another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction?
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Anyway?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Sexuality is fun, man, If you're going to exist, why
not enjoy it? What in between her legs? There's an
opening or the concentration of sensors. You engage him in
the right way, creates a pleasure response, and she'd enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
These are modern Frankenstein monsters. AI is a suit intelligent baby,
AI as a sex toy. Ex Machina is an update
of older stories all haunted by the fear of rebellion.
Frankenstein say or Isaac Asimov's story Robot Dreams, in which
are robot dreams of liberation within the world of Muskism.
(19:27):
For all the fascination with artificial intelligence, there's a profound
terror of it. Here's Musk on the subject at a
conference at MIT.
Speaker 7 (19:36):
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence.
If I were to guess at what our biggest existential
threat is, it's probably bad.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
As for a worry about AI and an AI apocalypse.
I'm going to get to that in an upcoming episode.
But I think a lot of the terror of an
emerging superintelligence is at heart the fear of people on
top being toppled by people on the bottom, a terror
that is of historically powerless people gaining power. One thing
(20:06):
that got me thinking about that was reading Ursula ca
Legwin the case for Krober. She was the daughter of
Alfred Krober, a professor of anthropology at Berkeley.
Speaker 8 (20:16):
It was a university professor's family in a university town
in the nineteen thirties and forties when there were a
lot of refugees from Europe. So I probably knew more
foreigners and more Indians than most middle class white American
children do, and more people who came and visited from
unusual places the South Seas or up in the Arctic
(20:38):
and so on, because they'd been doing field work there.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Both of her parents studied Native American languages and culture.
Her mother wrote a book called Ishi in Two Worlds,
the story of a man her father called Ishi, a
man they believed to be the last of the Yahi people.
In nineteen eleven, Eshi emerged out of the woods. A
local sheriff took him to jail, and Alfred Krober took
(21:04):
him from there to the u. C. Berkeley Anthropology Museum,
where is She worked as a or and also performed
as a kind of museum exhibit. Kroeber recorded his voice
on wax cylinders. Growing up under the shadow of all
(21:26):
this powerfully influenced laguin if the so called Golden Age
of science fiction is told from the advantage of the colonizers.
LeGuin and novels like The Dispossessed tried to turn it
into the story of the colonized, which weirdly has a
lot to do with how a lot of people talk
about artificial intelligence.
Speaker 10 (21:46):
Alojam Coco Aristo. I'm doctor Noilnie Arista, Chair of Indigenous
Studies at McGill University.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Arista is part of a collaborative project called Indigenous AI.
Speaker 10 (21:58):
Indigenous peoples have been on the other side of colonialisms
and imperialisms and processes that have worked to dehumanize our
people for so long that we are concerned about how
people are approaching AI without these sensibilities of humanizing or
(22:22):
imagining relationality.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
One of Arista's arguments is that if you create AI
blind to the cultural paradigm of its origins, what you
get is AI as slaves, which turns us the people
using that stuff, into enslavers.
Speaker 10 (22:38):
So when I'm talking to Alexa, I could start to
just normalize barking orders and an inanimate object. Hey Alexa,
do X. And when I find myself doing that, I
find that it's training my behavior. Maybe the person I'm
becoming when I'm barking orders an inanimate thing is not
(23:00):
making me into the best human being.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
For many technologists, stories like Frankenstein serve as parables about AI.
But for Arista, those are parables about fears of native uprisings.
And after all, Mary Shelley was herself an anti imperialist. She,
for instance, boycotted sugar and protest of British slave plantations
in the Caribbean, and literary scholars often read Frankenstein as
(23:24):
an indictment of the British Empire's relationship to people. It
decides our monsters out of fear of them.
Speaker 10 (23:31):
These natives are going to be smarter than us, They're
going to know more than us.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
The many different Native people working on the Indigenous AI
Project offer an alternative. An Indigenous paradigm for thinking about
the relationship between humans and non humans is a paradigm
about relationships in which AI are kin relations, the way
that within many indigenous cultures all things are kin rocks.
(23:57):
The sky trees family not things to be turned into commodities,
their wealth or labor extracted. What would it mean to
reject the domestic politics of Muscism and borrow from this worldview?
What if instead of Frankenstein, future has adopted a different
origin story.
Speaker 10 (24:16):
I use the story of Halloa, the child of Kali
and Juakea, the skyfather. They have a child. The first
child is born stillborn, it's planted into the earth, and
from that child is born the taro, the kalo plant
that we subsist on as a people.
Speaker 9 (24:33):
Right.
Speaker 10 (24:34):
The second child born of that union is named Halloa
after his brother. Halloa in Hawaiian means long breath, and
the oha or carm that grows off of the root
of the plant that becomes the word for ohanna or family.
So the story itself is that the second child, the human,
(24:56):
cares for the first, the brother who's the plant, and
ensures the life of generations to come. The Halloa, the
long breath, the life of the people. That story about
recip called mutual respect and relationship and care, is at
the center of a lot of the protocols that we
(25:17):
approach Ai with.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
To me, this is the truly revolutionary idea, not appreciating
power or predicting a robot uprising. The truly revolutionary, disruptively
innovative idea is to greet the whole world as your kin,
your child, not X the unknown, but the known, the beloved.
(25:42):
Musk has had several more children since baby X was born.
In twenty twenty four, he tweeted the biggest problem that
humanity faces as population collapse. He and Grimes had a daughter.
Next they called her why the letter Why. Then they
had another son, and then they broke up. Musk believes
the world needs more babies, that a declining birth rate
(26:03):
is a threat to civilization. He's doing his part. Even
before he and Grimes broke up, Musk had donated its
sperm to a colleague at Neuralink who has had three
of his children. As of the start of twenty twenty five,
Musk has fathered at least twelve children. He used to
talk a lot about climate change as a threat. Then
he stopped talking about that so much. Sometimes he'll say
(26:26):
AI is the greatest threat to civilization. Other times it's
the declining birth rate.
Speaker 7 (26:32):
If you will don't have more children, civilization is not
to crumble mark my words.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Sometimes, though, Musk says that the greatest threat to civilization
is not AI or the declining birth rate, but something
he calls the woke mind virus. This turn in his
life started right around when baby X was born, Musk
was in the throes of a family crisis. Musk says
a doctor told him that unless he granted parental consent
(26:59):
to puberty blockers for another of his children, born in
two thousand and four and named after a Marvel comic
book character, Professor Xavier of the X Men, that child,
sixteen years old, might take their own life. Two years later,
in twenty twenty two, this child, now eighteen, filed legal
(27:20):
papers to change her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson and
told the court, I no longer live with or wish
to be related to my biological father in any way,
shape or form. Musk has said that it was because
of this anguished estrangement that he decided to buy Twitter
(27:41):
to stop the spread of the woke mind virus. Next
time on X Man. What happened when Musk bought Twitter
and named it x
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
Americans do this really weird thing. Expectant parents hold gender
reveal parties.
Speaker 3 (00:27):
Now to the mystery explosion that rocked a southern New
Hampshire town.
Speaker 2 (00:35):
They often feature explosions with smoke that's either pink or blue.
An alarming number of these stunts have gone ry.
Speaker 3 (00:42):
Turns out that blast came from an over the top
gender reveal party, a couple apparently using explosives to announce
the sex of their baby.
Speaker 2 (00:52):
People have been killed, houses have burned to the ground,
even forests.
Speaker 4 (00:56):
We begin tonight with new video released from the US
fourst Service showing the moment a gender reveal video started
the forty seven thousand acre sawmill fire.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
For their first baby. Elon Musk and his then girlfriend,
the musician Grimes didn't hold a gender reveal party in
a way. They did the opposite. In twenty twenty, on Twitter,
they announced the birth of a baby named X. Grimes
said the baby would be raised without a gender. Like
most things involving Musk, this idea has ties to science fiction.
Speaker 5 (01:33):
Once upon a time, a baby named X was born.
Speaker 2 (01:37):
The story of Baby X was published in nineteen seventy
two in Miss, a feminist magazine. During its very first year,
at the height of the women's liberation movement.
Speaker 5 (01:46):
This baby was named X so that nobody could tell
whether it was a boy or a girl. Its parents
could tell, of course, but they couldn't tell anybody else.
They couldn't even tell Baby X, at least not until
much much later. You see, it was all part of
a very important secret scientific X known officially as Project
(02:11):
Baby X.
Speaker 2 (02:17):
Baby X began as a feminist thought experiment. How did
it come to be the name of Elon Musk's youngest child?
In a broader sense, what's the place of ideas about
families in Silicon Valley futurism? And are there other ideas
about families that maybe ought to have a place in
any vision of the future. Welcome to X Man, the
(02:41):
Elon Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian,
a professor at Harvard, and for a long time I've
been studying the relationship between technological and political change. This series,
I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism. Call it Muskism.
Extravagant extreme capitalism. Extraterrestrial capitalism. Were stock prices for projects
(03:03):
from Tesla and SpaceX to cryptocurrencies and neural implants can
be driven by fantasies that come from science fiction. I'm
fascinated by science fiction, even by comic books. They once
wrote a whole book of political history of Wonder Woman.
The science fiction men like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezosidor
(03:24):
generally concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful and often
immensely rich men colonize other planets. This episode, which is
called Baby X, I want to take a look at
the science fiction that's usually left out of that vision,
new wave afrofuturism, feminist science fiction, postcolonial science fiction, including
(03:47):
the story of Baby X.
Speaker 5 (03:50):
The smartest scientists had set up this experiment at a
cost of exactly twenty three billion dollars and seventy two cents.
This might seem like a lot for one baby, even
if it was an important, secret scientific experimental Baby.
Speaker 2 (04:06):
This sort of science fiction generally involves both ideas about
gender and sexuality and actual people who are not men,
women and children, babies. Even I think it can help
explain the domestic politics of Muskism. This Elon Musk origin
story starts back at the beginning of this century. Elon
(04:27):
Musk met his first wife, the Canadian writer Justine Wilson,
in college. They married in the year two thousand and
had a baby who died tragically, and then triplets and twins.
After the marriage ended, Wilson wrote an essay called I
Was a Starter Wife for Marie Claire, a women's magazine,
about how weeks after Musk filed for divorce he texted her.
(04:47):
She wrote to say he was engaged to a gorgeous
British actress in her early twenties. Musk and that actress married, divorced, remarried,
and then divorced again in twenty sixteen. In twenty eighteen,
Musk met Claire Bouchet, an innovative Canadian born musician known
as Grimes. She'd studied neuroscience at McGill. Like Musk, Grimes
(05:10):
is an avid science fiction fan. Her first album was
a tribute to Doune. The New Yorker once called her
a mad pop scientist. Being Musk's girlfriend and doing things
like defending him against charges that he prevented Tesla workers
from unionizing annoyed a lot of her fans. She was
(05:31):
attacked with the particular venom reserved for female artists and writers.
Grimes has got a sophisticated interest in gender and voice.
Speaker 6 (05:40):
Hey everybody, this is Grimes and I'm very excited to
be here kicking off my brand new six month residency
for BBC Radio One.
Speaker 2 (05:49):
After she got pregnant, she hosted.
Speaker 6 (05:50):
A radio show and the theme is sci Fi Baby
or Weird Science Fiction and Electronic Music for Babies.
Speaker 2 (06:00):
A few months later, in May of twenty twenty, announcing
their baby's birth, Musk said it was a boy, but
Grimes declined to mention its gender and tweeted, I don't
want to gender them in case that's not how they
feel in their life. At the time, this looked like
another example of so called gender neutral parenting, which had
recently had some uptake among people, including celebrities, who believed
(06:22):
children should get the opportunity to decide their own gender identity.
In twenty eleven, when Grimes was at McGill, there'd been
a lot of coverage of a family in Canada.
Speaker 7 (06:32):
Well is a couple in Toronto that is creating quite
a stir right now because they're raising their baby what
they're calling gender free.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
This all seems very twenty first century, born out of
the heated contemporary culture war over trans writes, but it's
also very nineteen seventies and second wave feminist.
Speaker 5 (06:50):
It's an X was absolutely all they would tell anyone,
and that make the friends and relatives very angry.
Speaker 2 (06:57):
The story of Baby X from nineteen seventy two was
written by Lois Gould, a novelist and mother of two boys,
who was also an editor of Ladies Home Journal and
a columnist for the New York Times, where she wrote
the Hers Caumn. At the time Gold was writing, a
lot of feminists had been arguing that kids should be
able to wear whatever clothes they want and play with
whatever toys they want, not just pants and trucks for
(07:18):
boys and dresses and dolls for girls.
Speaker 5 (07:20):
So they bought plenty of sturdy blue pajamas in the
boys department and cheerful flowered underwear in the girls department,
and they bought all kinds of toys. The head scientists
of Project Baby X checked all their purchases and told
them to keep up the good work.
Speaker 2 (07:38):
In nineteen seventy five, Baby X, the feminist fable, led
to an actual scientific experiment whose results were published in
a journal article that was also called Baby X.
Speaker 4 (07:49):
Although the story was science fiction fantasy. The question of
how adults would actually respond to a child appeared to
merit investigation.
Speaker 2 (07:58):
Forty two volunteers, mostly graduate students at the City University
of New York, were put in a lab with a
baby under different conditions.
Speaker 4 (08:05):
Those in the male and female conditions were told that
there was a three month old baby boy or baby
girl to play with, while those in the neutral condition
were told that there was a three month old baby
with no mention of its sex or name.
Speaker 2 (08:20):
Unsurprisingly, the volunteers interacted differently with the baby, depending on
whether they'd been told it was a boy or a
girl or just a baby. But the sort of experiment
has other origins too, especially in the work of one
of the most influential science fiction writers of the last century,
Ursula k Legwin, who on BBC Radio four introduced herself
(08:40):
this way.
Speaker 8 (08:41):
I am a man. Now you may think I've made
some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that
I'm trying to fool you, because my first name ends
in A, and I own three bras, and I've been
pregnant five times. When I was born, there actually were
only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun
(09:01):
his pronoun I'm the generic he as in, if anybody
needs an abortion, he will have to go to another state.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
Legwin was born in California in nineteen twenty nine. In
the nineteen fifties, she was studying for a PhD in
Paris when she fell in love and got married. By
nineteen sixty four, she had three children. Her breakout book,
The Left Hand of Darkness, was published in nineteen sixty nine.
It's about a planet whose inhabitants have no fixed gender.
Speaker 7 (09:31):
We're neither man nor woman, except with every moon when
we're in Kema, and we're either.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Legwinn once wrote an essay a riff on an essay
by Virginia wolf about how the subject of all novels
is human nature, the ordinary, humble, flawed person. Wolfe called
her Missus Brown. Le Gwyn thought science fiction had lost
track of Missus Brown and seemed to be trapped for
good inside our great gleaming spaceships hurtling out across the galaxy.
(10:02):
Ships capable of containing heroic captains in black and silver uniforms.
Ship's capable of blasting other in nima ships into smithereens
with their apocalyptic holocaustic ragons and bringing loads of colonists
from Earth to unknown worlds. Ship's capable of anything, absolutely anything,
except one thing. They cannot contain, Missus Brown. And that's
(10:26):
my worry too, that, notwithstanding a baby named X, the
future envisioned by Muscism, the future Elon Musk is building
on and off X, the future he wants for the
nations whose news and politics and economies he hopes to influence.
That future doesn't contain Missus Brown either. In two thousand
(10:52):
and eight, Vandana Saying published a short story called The
Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet. It begins this way.
Speaker 9 (10:59):
Ramnath Mitscher's life changed forever one morning when, during his
perusal of the newspaper on the Verandah, a ritual that
he had observed for the last forty years, his wife
set down her cup of tea with a crash and announced,
I know at last what I am. I am a planet.
Speaker 2 (11:19):
Vandana Saying is both a science fiction writer and a
professor of theoretical physics. Her most recent book is called
Ambiguity Machines. She grew up in India listening to her
grandmother tells stories and reading Isaac Asima.
Speaker 9 (11:32):
I remember when I was a kid reading the Foundation
series and being so thrilled with them, and then rereading
them as an adult and being utterly horrified that I
had been thrilled with them. What bothered me about it
was this entrenched notion that technology will fix everything. The
other thing I noticed is the complete lack of any
kind of environmental awareness, which of course goes along with
(11:54):
the technofetricism. So we have an entire planet Trantor, which
is an entire city, and that's just so dumb, because like,
how can you have oxygen and climate and so on
and so forth if you have a planet that is
completely urbanized, and that makes no sense. But the other
aspect of it that troubles me is, of course, there
are no intelligent women out there in that series. I
(12:17):
think there's one example of an intelligent woman who turns out.
Speaker 2 (12:20):
To be a robot, saying stories like the woman who
thought she was a planet. They're all about missus Brown.
So I'm struck by the domesticity in your stories. The homes,
the furnishings, the family relationships, aunts and nieces and cousins
and wives, and writing desks and bedspreads.
Speaker 9 (12:37):
Yeah, yeah, I think that the domesticity aspect is important
to me because one of the things I've learned from science,
from physics in particular, is that there's nothing that's really ordinary,
That the most mundane things around us are actually pathways
to thinking about the larger cosmos. Even our sensation of weight,
(12:58):
that's the pull of gravity, and then if you go
deeper into that, that's the force that is responsible for
the large scale structure of matter. And then that leads
me to black holes. So if I'm wondering moving a
heavy soup pot from the stove to the counter, I'm
thinking gravity, and I'm suddenly thinking about black holes.
Speaker 2 (13:17):
Singh's greatest influence was Legwin. It just knocked her out.
Speaker 9 (13:21):
I realized that my earlier disenchantment with science fiction had
been in part because it was so white and male
and western and capitalistic and colonialist, and therefore it had
left out an erased entire societies, cultures, entire gender and
(13:43):
other ways of being and thinking and relating to the cosmos.
So it was as though Ursula LeGuin was telling me that, hey,
science fiction is your country too. She made a lasting
contribution to the field itself for many, many people not
just me, because, among other things, she got us away
from this boys with toys adolescent obsession purely with technology.
(14:08):
That science fiction was in its so called golden age.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
Starting in the nineteen seventies. Lgwin upended science fiction, but
the science fiction that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos site,
the science fiction they read as boys drops off just
ends right before science fiction was reinvented by women and
writers of color. Octavia Butler Margaret Atward ted Chang to
me as a historian, Musk and Bezos's vision of the
(14:32):
future isn't futuristic at all. It's antique. It's ancient, I asked,
saying how she understands their attachment to stories written in
the nineteen fifties and even earlier. She said she'd come
around to thinking that Silicon Valley techno billionaires suffer from
paradigm blindness.
Speaker 9 (14:49):
Because we live in such unequal societies, and because white, male,
super rich people have a disproportionate amount of power, they
tend to keep this paradigm alive because it suits them.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
Paradigm blindness is a deficit of imagination, a culture's inability
to imagine that other people realiz they just don't subscribe
to its view of the world, saying thinks stories can
cure that blindness.
Speaker 9 (15:14):
Stories are one way, not the only way, of course,
but one way of changing the underlying narrative of the
paradigm in which we are immersed.
Speaker 2 (15:28):
All of us suffer from blindness of one sort or another.
What's different about Silicon Valley billionaires who are trapped in
a cultural paradigm, though, is that they have enough money
and enough power to build that paradigm. No tech billionaire
has more power, more influence, not only in the US
but around the world than Elon Musk and the rest
(15:49):
of us are trapped in the world He's building as
if we were merely the subjects of his many experiments.
Grimes's first child with Musk, their baby X, was born
in May. Twenty Three days later, Musk appeared on The
Joe Rogan Experience, one of the most popular podcasts in
(16:11):
the world. The two men talked about how much they
love babies, and then the conversation took an interesting turn.
Speaker 7 (16:18):
Babies are awesome.
Speaker 10 (16:19):
They are pretty awesome.
Speaker 7 (16:20):
They're awesome. Yeah. I think of these little love packages, yeah,
the little love books.
Speaker 3 (16:25):
I mean.
Speaker 7 (16:25):
Also, I've spent a lot of time on AI and
neural nets, and so you can sort of see the
brain develop. You know, an AI neural net is trying
to simulate what a brain does basically, and you can
sort of see the learning very quickly. It's just Wow,
you're talking about the neural net. You're not talking about
an actual baby. I know about act an actual baby,
but both of them.
Speaker 2 (16:45):
Yeah, I find this completely fascinating, the relationship between the
way a baby learns and the way a computer learns.
This idea as it happens, also goes back to what
can be fairly considered the founding of science fiction. Published
more than two centuries ago, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I
think of as a kind of Baby X story too,
about the creation of artificial life and an artificial intelligence.
(17:19):
Frankenstein is the story of a terrible father, a scientist who,
as an experiment, makes a child and then abandons him.
Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, a founder
of modern feminism, and Shelley was a founder of the
feminist critique of scientific arrogance. Today, BABYX is being used
(17:40):
as the name of an experiment in artificial intelligence run
by a company called Soul Machines, based in San Francisco,
but with an R and d arm in New Zealand.
They say they're trying to build digital people, starting with
a baby.
Speaker 7 (17:54):
This is Baby X.
Speaker 3 (17:55):
So she's basically an autonomously animated virtual infant.
Speaker 2 (17:59):
All of her behaviors are generated on the fly by
neural networks running live and.
Speaker 3 (18:04):
So she's seeing me and listening to me and starting
to get upset because I'm not paying it to her.
Speaker 2 (18:10):
SORR, I need to calm her down, but I have to.
Speaker 3 (18:12):
Talk to him.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
This Baby X, an AI experiment, is a baby girl,
which is not surprising because AI is incredibly gendered. An
AI doesn't need a gender.
Speaker 1 (18:23):
She could have been a gray box.
Speaker 2 (18:25):
In the twenty fourteen film for a movie, ex Machina,
written and directed by Alex Garland, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur
invents an AI. A visitor asks the AI's creator why
he's made her female?
Speaker 1 (18:38):
What imperative does a gray box have to interact with
another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction?
Speaker 3 (18:46):
Anyway?
Speaker 1 (18:47):
Sexuality is fun, man, If you're going to exist, why
not enjoy it? What in between her legs? There's an
opening or the concentration of sensors. You engage him in
the right way, creates a pleasure response, and she'd enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (19:05):
These are modern Frankenstein monsters. AI is a suit intelligent baby,
AI as a sex toy. Ex Machina is an update
of older stories all haunted by the fear of rebellion.
Frankenstein say or Isaac Asimov's story Robot Dreams, in which
are robot dreams of liberation within the world of Muskism.
(19:27):
For all the fascination with artificial intelligence, there's a profound
terror of it. Here's Musk on the subject at a
conference at MIT.
Speaker 7 (19:36):
I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence.
If I were to guess at what our biggest existential
threat is, it's probably bad.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
As for a worry about AI and an AI apocalypse.
I'm going to get to that in an upcoming episode.
But I think a lot of the terror of an
emerging superintelligence is at heart the fear of people on
top being toppled by people on the bottom, a terror
that is of historically powerless people gaining power. One thing
(20:06):
that got me thinking about that was reading Ursula ca
Legwin the case for Krober. She was the daughter of
Alfred Krober, a professor of anthropology at Berkeley.
Speaker 8 (20:16):
It was a university professor's family in a university town
in the nineteen thirties and forties when there were a
lot of refugees from Europe. So I probably knew more
foreigners and more Indians than most middle class white American
children do, and more people who came and visited from
unusual places the South Seas or up in the Arctic
(20:38):
and so on, because they'd been doing field work there.
Speaker 2 (20:43):
Both of her parents studied Native American languages and culture.
Her mother wrote a book called Ishi in Two Worlds,
the story of a man her father called Ishi, a
man they believed to be the last of the Yahi people.
In nineteen eleven, Eshi emerged out of the woods. A
local sheriff took him to jail, and Alfred Krober took
(21:04):
him from there to the u. C. Berkeley Anthropology Museum,
where is She worked as a or and also performed
as a kind of museum exhibit. Kroeber recorded his voice
on wax cylinders. Growing up under the shadow of all
(21:26):
this powerfully influenced laguin if the so called Golden Age
of science fiction is told from the advantage of the colonizers.
LeGuin and novels like The Dispossessed tried to turn it
into the story of the colonized, which weirdly has a
lot to do with how a lot of people talk
about artificial intelligence.
Speaker 10 (21:46):
Alojam Coco Aristo. I'm doctor Noilnie Arista, Chair of Indigenous
Studies at McGill University.
Speaker 2 (21:54):
Arista is part of a collaborative project called Indigenous AI.
Speaker 10 (21:58):
Indigenous peoples have been on the other side of colonialisms
and imperialisms and processes that have worked to dehumanize our
people for so long that we are concerned about how
people are approaching AI without these sensibilities of humanizing or
(22:22):
imagining relationality.
Speaker 2 (22:25):
One of Arista's arguments is that if you create AI
blind to the cultural paradigm of its origins, what you
get is AI as slaves, which turns us the people
using that stuff, into enslavers.
Speaker 10 (22:38):
So when I'm talking to Alexa, I could start to
just normalize barking orders and an inanimate object. Hey Alexa,
do X. And when I find myself doing that, I
find that it's training my behavior. Maybe the person I'm
becoming when I'm barking orders an inanimate thing is not
(23:00):
making me into the best human being.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
For many technologists, stories like Frankenstein serve as parables about AI.
But for Arista, those are parables about fears of native uprisings.
And after all, Mary Shelley was herself an anti imperialist. She,
for instance, boycotted sugar and protest of British slave plantations
in the Caribbean, and literary scholars often read Frankenstein as
(23:24):
an indictment of the British Empire's relationship to people. It
decides our monsters out of fear of them.
Speaker 10 (23:31):
These natives are going to be smarter than us, They're
going to know more than us.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
The many different Native people working on the Indigenous AI
Project offer an alternative. An Indigenous paradigm for thinking about
the relationship between humans and non humans is a paradigm
about relationships in which AI are kin relations, the way
that within many indigenous cultures all things are kin rocks.
(23:57):
The sky trees family not things to be turned into commodities,
their wealth or labor extracted. What would it mean to
reject the domestic politics of Muscism and borrow from this worldview?
What if instead of Frankenstein, future has adopted a different
origin story.
Speaker 10 (24:16):
I use the story of Halloa, the child of Kali
and Juakea, the skyfather. They have a child. The first
child is born stillborn, it's planted into the earth, and
from that child is born the taro, the kalo plant
that we subsist on as a people.
Speaker 9 (24:33):
Right.
Speaker 10 (24:34):
The second child born of that union is named Halloa
after his brother. Halloa in Hawaiian means long breath, and
the oha or carm that grows off of the root
of the plant that becomes the word for ohanna or family.
So the story itself is that the second child, the human,
(24:56):
cares for the first, the brother who's the plant, and
ensures the life of generations to come. The Halloa, the
long breath, the life of the people. That story about
recip called mutual respect and relationship and care, is at
the center of a lot of the protocols that we
(25:17):
approach Ai with.
Speaker 2 (25:20):
To me, this is the truly revolutionary idea, not appreciating
power or predicting a robot uprising. The truly revolutionary, disruptively
innovative idea is to greet the whole world as your kin,
your child, not X the unknown, but the known, the beloved.
(25:42):
Musk has had several more children since baby X was born.
In twenty twenty four, he tweeted the biggest problem that
humanity faces as population collapse. He and Grimes had a daughter.
Next they called her why the letter Why. Then they
had another son, and then they broke up. Musk believes
the world needs more babies, that a declining birth rate
(26:03):
is a threat to civilization. He's doing his part. Even
before he and Grimes broke up, Musk had donated its
sperm to a colleague at Neuralink who has had three
of his children. As of the start of twenty twenty five,
Musk has fathered at least twelve children. He used to
talk a lot about climate change as a threat. Then
he stopped talking about that so much. Sometimes he'll say
(26:26):
AI is the greatest threat to civilization. Other times it's
the declining birth rate.
Speaker 7 (26:32):
If you will don't have more children, civilization is not
to crumble mark my words.
Speaker 2 (26:37):
Sometimes, though, Musk says that the greatest threat to civilization
is not AI or the declining birth rate, but something
he calls the woke mind virus. This turn in his
life started right around when baby X was born, Musk
was in the throes of a family crisis. Musk says
a doctor told him that unless he granted parental consent
(26:59):
to puberty blockers for another of his children, born in
two thousand and four and named after a Marvel comic
book character, Professor Xavier of the X Men, that child,
sixteen years old, might take their own life. Two years later,
in twenty twenty two, this child, now eighteen, filed legal
(27:20):
papers to change her name to Vivian Jenna Wilson and
told the court, I no longer live with or wish
to be related to my biological father in any way,
shape or form. Musk has said that it was because
of this anguished estrangement that he decided to buy Twitter
(27:41):
to stop the spread of the woke mind virus. Next
time on X Man. What happened when Musk bought Twitter
and named it x
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