November 22, 2021 • 27 mins
The science fiction that Silicon Valley techno-billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Peter Thiel adore often concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically powerful and often immensely rich men colonize other planets. In this episode, Jill Lepore takes a look at the science fiction that’s usually left out of this vision. New Wave, feminist, post-colonial science fiction. Including the story of Baby X, a story from the 1970s about a child - like Musk’s youngest son - named X.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Americans do this really weird thing. Expectant parents hold
gender reveal parties now to the mystery explosion that rocked
a southern New Hampshire town. They often feature explosions with
(00:39):
smoke that's either pink or blue. An alarming number of
these stunts have gone RYE 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.
People have been killed, houses have burned to the ground,
even forests. We begin to night with new video released
(01:01):
from the US Forest Service showing the moment a gender
reveal video started the forty seven thousand acres Sawmill fire.
Elon Musk and his former girlfriend, the musician Grimes, didn't
hold a gender reveal party in a way. They did
the opposite. Last year on Twitter, they announced the birth
of their baby, who was named X. Grimes that the
(01:23):
baby would be raised without a gender. Like most things
involving Elon Musk, this move looks like it has its
origins in science fiction. Once upon a Time, a baby
named X was born. 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. This baby was named X so that
(01:46):
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 experiment known officially
(02:07):
as Project Baby X. 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 may be
(02:29):
ought to have a place in any vision of the future.
Welcome to The Evening Rocket, a special report. I'm Jill Lapoor.
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.
(02:52):
Call it Muscism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock
prices for projects 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.
(03:14):
They once read a whole about the political history of
Wonder Woman. The science fiction men like Elon Musk and
Jeff bezos Ador 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
(03:36):
that vision new way, afrofuturism, feminist science fiction, post colonial
science fiction, including the story of Baby X. 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
(03:57):
it was an important, secret scientific experimental Baby. This sort
of science fiction generally involves both ideas about gender and
sexuality and actual people who are not men and children babies.
Even I think I can help explain the domestic politics
of extreme capitalism. So blast off back to the beginning
(04:18):
of this century. No blue smoke, no pink smoke. Elon
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
(04:39):
Was a Starter Wife for Marie Claire, a women's magazine,
about how weeks after Musk filed for divorce he texted her.
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,
(05:03):
Musk met Claire Bouchet, an innovative Canadian born musician known
as Grimes. She had studied neuroscience at McGill. Like Musk,
Grimes is an avid science fiction fan. Her first album
was a tribute to Doone. The New Yorker once called
her a mad pop scientist. She's also a feminist, and
she's offered a fierce indictment of the music industry, where
(05:24):
she said women feel pressure to act like strippers and
it's okay to make grape threats. 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's been attacked with a particular venom reserved for female
artists and writers. Grimes has got a sophisticated interest in
(05:46):
gender and voice. 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. After she got pregnant,
she hosted a radio show and the theme is sci
Fi Baby or weird science fiction and electronic music for babies. Now,
(06:07):
this song might be a little hard for some babies,
but some babies might really like it. This is definitely
a bit of a hard song though, so I guess
you know, to see how your baby feels, and if
they don't like techno, then don't play them this song.
Cool sweet. A few months later, announcing their baby's birth,
Musk said it was a boy, but Grimes declined to
(06:28):
mention its gender and tweeted, I don't want to gender
them in case that's not how they feel in their life.
This is called gender neutral parenting. It's had some recent
uptake among people including celebrities who support the cause of
trans rights and who believe children should get the opportunity
to decide their own gender identity. In twenty eleven, when
Grimes was at McGill, there was a lot of coverage
(06:50):
of a family in Canada. Well, it's a couple in
Toronto that is creating a quite a stir right now
because they're raising their baby what they're calling gender free.
This all seems very twenty first century, born out of
the heated contemporary culture war over trans rights, but it's
also very nineteen seventies and second wave feminist. It's an
X was absolutely all they would tell anyone, and that
(07:13):
made the friends and relatives very angry. 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 HER's column.
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,
(07:35):
not just pants and trucks for boys and dresses and
dolls for girls. 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.
(07:57):
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. Although
the story was science fiction fantasy, the question of how
adults would actually respond to a child appeared to merit investigation.
Forty two volunteers, mostly graduate students at the City University
(08:20):
of New York, were put in a lab with a
baby under different conditions. 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. Unsurprisingly, the volunteers interacted differently with the baby,
(08:41):
depending on whether they'd been told it was a boy
or a girl, or just a baby. But this 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. LeGuin, who on BBC Radio
four introduced herself this way, I am a man. Now
you may think I've made some kind of silly mistake
(09:03):
about gender, or maybe that I'm trying to fool you,
because my first name ends in A, and I owned
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. His pronoun, I'm the generic key,
as in, if anybody needs an abortion, he will have
(09:27):
to go to another state. 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. We're neither man nor
(09:51):
woman except with every moon when we're in Kema, and
what either. Legwin 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
Wolf called her Missus Brown. Legwin thought science fiction had
(10:12):
lost track of Missus Brown and seemed to be trapped
for good inside our great gleaming Spaceships hurtling out across
the galaxy, Ships capable of containing heroic captains and black
and silver uniforms. Ships capable of blasting other inimical ships
into smitherines with their apocalyptic holocaustic rayguns, and of bringing
(10:32):
loads of colonists from Earth to unknown worlds. Ships capable
of anything, absolutely anything, except one thing. They cannot contain
Missus Brown. And that's my worry too, the worry that,
notwithstanding a baby named X, the future envisioned by Muscism,
(10:53):
the future being built in Silicon Valley, it doesn't contain
Missus Brown either. In two thousand and eight, Vandanna Saying
published a short story called The Woman Who Thought She
Was a Planet. It begins this way. Ramnath Mishra's life
(11:16):
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. Vandana
Saying is both a science fiction writer and a professor
(11:36):
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 Asimov. 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.
(11:57):
What bothered me about it was this entrenched notion that
technology will fix everything. The other thing I notice is
the complete lack of any kind of environmental awareness, which
of course goes along with techno fetishism. So we have
an entire planet Trantor, which is an entire city, and
that's just so dumb, because like, how can you have
(12:18):
oxygen and climate and so on and so forth if
you have a planet that is completely urbanized. I mean,
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 think there's one
example of an intelligent woman who turns out to be
a robot. Seeing stories like the Woman who Thought She
(12:38):
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. 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,
(13:00):
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, 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.
(13:23):
So if I'm pondering moving a heavy soup pot from
the stove to the counter, I'm thinking gravity, and I'm
suddenly thinking about black holes. Singh's greatest influence was Lagwen.
It just knocked her out. I realized that my earlier
disenchantment with science fiction had been in part because it
(13:43):
was so white and male and western and capitalistic. And colonialist,
and therefore it had left out and erased entire societies, cultures,
entire gender and other ways of being and thinking and
relating to the cosmos. So it was as though Ursula
(14:04):
Liguin was telling me that, hey, science fiction is your
country too. 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 that science fiction was in its
so called golden age starting in the nineteen seventies. Laguin
(14:28):
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 future isn't futuristic at all. It's antique.
(14:50):
It's ancient, I asked, seeing how she understands their attachment.
The story is 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. Because we live in
such unequal societies, and because white, male, super rich people
have a disproportionate amount of power, they tend to keep
(15:13):
this paradigm alive because it suits them. Paradigm blindness is
a deficit of imagination, a culture's inability to imagine that
other people really just don't subscribe to its view of
the world. Saying things stories can cure that blindness. Stories
are one way, not the only way, of course, but
one way of changing the underlying narrative of the paradigm
(15:37):
in which we are immersed. 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, and then the rest of us are
trapped in the world they're building as if we're subjects
of their experiments. That's Grimes singing about artificial intelligence. Grimes
(16:16):
and Musk are both storytellers. Their baby X was born
in May twenty twenty three. Days after Grimes gave birth,
Musk appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, where the two
men talked about how much they love babies, and then
the conversation took an interesting turn. Babies are awesome. They
are pretty awesome. They're awesome. Yeah. I think of them
like these little love packages. Yeah, little love bugs. I mean. Also,
(16:38):
I've spent a lot of time on AI and neural nets,
and so you can sort of see the brain developed.
You know what, an annual 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 don't know about an actual baby, but
(16:58):
both of them. 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 hook and 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
(17:22):
artificial intelligence. 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 Wolstroncraft,
(17:45):
a founder of modern feminism, and Shelley was a founder
of the feminist critique of scientific arrogance Fundamental to what
We're doing as a research project called baby X. Today,
Baby X is being used 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
(18:07):
arm in New Zealand. They say they're trying to build
digital people, starting with a baby. This is a baby X,
So she's basically an autonomously animated virtual infant, all of
her behaviors generated on the fly by neural networks running
live and so she's seeing me and listening to me
and staying to get upset as I'm not paying attention
(18:28):
to her, so I need to calm her down. 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. She could have been a gray box.
In the twenty fourteen film for a movie, X Machina,
written and directed by Alex Garland, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur
(18:51):
invents an AI, a visitor asks the AI's creator why
he's made her female sexuality is fun, man, If you're
going to exist, why not enjoy it? What in between
her legs as an opening with a concentration of sensors.
You engage him in the right way, creates a pleasure response,
(19:14):
and she'd enjoy it. These are modern Frankenstein monsters. AI
is a super 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 a robot dreams of liberation
(19:37):
within the world of Muskism. 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. I mean,
with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon, and I
take it there will be no hail nine thousand going
up to Mars. How nine thousand would be easy. It's
(19:59):
way more complex than I mean, would put hell nine
thousands of shame? I was like poppy Dog, for sure.
There's a lot to worry about with artificial intelligence. Beyond
a rogue operating system. Like two thousand and one's Hail
nine thousand. There's lots that's already happening facial recognition, predictive policing,
(20:23):
AI driven mortgage evaluations, and criminal court sentencing guidelines. And
there's plenty to worry about with things that haven't happened
yet but look likely as the pace of machine learning increases. Still,
I also think there's something deeper and broader going on
here culturally in the terror of AI. I think a
(20:43):
lot of that fear 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. Ursula k Laguin The K is
(21:06):
for Kroeber. She was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, a
professor of anthropology at Berkeley. 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
(21:28):
who came and visited from unusual places the South Seas
or up in the Arctic and so on, because they'd
been doing field work there. 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, Ishi
(21:52):
emerged out of the woods. A local sheriff took him
to jail, and Alfred Kroeber took him from there to
the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum, where Ishi worked as a
janitor and also performed as a kind of museum exhibit.
Kroeber recorded his voice on wax cylinders. Growing up under
(22:18):
the shadow of all this powerfully influenced Laguin. If the
so called Golden Age of science fiction is told from
the advantage of the colonizers, Lagwin and novels like The
Dispossessed tried to turn it into the story of the colonized.
You might say then that people who worry about ai
is an existential risk are trapped in the paradigm of colonialism.
(22:39):
Is there an escape? Alohamaycaco Noilanista. I'm doctor noilandi Arista,
Chair of Indigenous Studies at McGill University. Arista is part
of a collaborative project called Indigenous AI. Indigenous peoples have
been on the other side of colonialisms and imperialisms and
(23:00):
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 imagining relationality. One
of Arista's arguments is that if you create AI blind
(23:23):
to the cultural paradigm of its origins, would you get
as AI as slaves, which turns us the people using
that stuff into enslavers. 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
(23:44):
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 making me into the best human being.
For many technologists, stories like Frankenstein serve as parables about AI,
but for Arista, those are parables about fears of native uprisings.
(24:07):
And after all, Mary Shelley was self an anti imperialist. She,
for instance, boycotted sugar and protest of British slave plantations
in the Caribbean, and literary scholars often read Frankenstein as
an indictment of the British Empire's relationship to people. It
decides our monsters out of fear of them. These natives
are gonna be smarter than us, They're going to know
(24:29):
more than us. 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.
It's a paradigm about relationships in which ai are kin relations,
the way that within many indigenous cultures all things are
(24:50):
kin rocks, 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 world view? What if instead of Frankenstein,
futureists adopted a different origin story. I use the story
(25:12):
of Halloa, the child of ho Ho Kuiklani and Waukea,
the sky Father. 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 callow plant that
we subsist on as a people. Right. The second child
born of that union is named Halloa after his brother
(25:34):
Hallow in Hawaiian means long breath, and the oha or
corm that grows off of the root of the plant
that becomes the word for ohana or family. So the
story itself is that the second child, the human, cares
for the first, the brother who's the plant, and ensures
(25:54):
the life of generations to come. The Halloa, the long breath,
the life of the people. That story about reciprocal mutual
respect and relationship and care is at the center of
a lot of the protocols that we approach Ai with.
Do you appreciate what do you appreciate? Power? Do you
(26:22):
appreciate 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, even
your Ai driven machines, as members of your family, your kin,
(26:44):
your child, not X the unknown, but the known, the beloved.
Next time, in our final installment, The Evening Rocket blasts
to the past for the last time with a look
at what muscism is doing to money. Jake. The Evening
(27:17):
Rocket was written and read by me Jillapoor For the BBC,
The Evening Rocket was produced by viv Jones. Oliver Riskin
Cuts was the researcher. The editor was Hugh Levinson. The
commissioning editor was Dan Clark. Iona Hammond was production coordinator.
Mixing by Graham put a Foot and original music by
Corn Tooth. For Pushkin, it was produced by Sophie Crane,
(27:37):
mckibbon and Jake Gorski, who also did the mix and
sound design. Production support from Ben Nattapafrick. Our executive producer
is Mielobell. Our operations team includes Danielle Lakhan, Maya Kanig
and Carl mcgliori. Thanks also to John Schnar's, Jacob Weisberg,
Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Nicole Moreno and Eric Sandler.
Pushkin. Americans do this really weird thing. Expectant parents hold
gender reveal parties now to the mystery explosion that rocked
a southern New Hampshire town. They often feature explosions with
(00:39):
smoke that's either pink or blue. An alarming number of
these stunts have gone RYE 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.
People have been killed, houses have burned to the ground,
even forests. We begin to night with new video released
(01:01):
from the US Forest Service showing the moment a gender
reveal video started the forty seven thousand acres Sawmill fire.
Elon Musk and his former girlfriend, the musician Grimes, didn't
hold a gender reveal party in a way. They did
the opposite. Last year on Twitter, they announced the birth
of their baby, who was named X. Grimes that the
(01:23):
baby would be raised without a gender. Like most things
involving Elon Musk, this move looks like it has its
origins in science fiction. Once upon a Time, a baby
named X was born. 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. This baby was named X so that
(01:46):
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 experiment known officially
(02:07):
as Project Baby X. 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 may be
(02:29):
ought to have a place in any vision of the future.
Welcome to The Evening Rocket, a special report. I'm Jill Lapoor.
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.
(02:52):
Call it Muscism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock
prices for projects 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.
(03:14):
They once read a whole about the political history of
Wonder Woman. The science fiction men like Elon Musk and
Jeff bezos Ador 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
(03:36):
that vision new way, afrofuturism, feminist science fiction, post colonial
science fiction, including the story of Baby X. 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
(03:57):
it was an important, secret scientific experimental Baby. This sort
of science fiction generally involves both ideas about gender and
sexuality and actual people who are not men and children babies.
Even I think I can help explain the domestic politics
of extreme capitalism. So blast off back to the beginning
(04:18):
of this century. No blue smoke, no pink smoke. Elon
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
(04:39):
Was a Starter Wife for Marie Claire, a women's magazine,
about how weeks after Musk filed for divorce he texted her.
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,
(05:03):
Musk met Claire Bouchet, an innovative Canadian born musician known
as Grimes. She had studied neuroscience at McGill. Like Musk,
Grimes is an avid science fiction fan. Her first album
was a tribute to Doone. The New Yorker once called
her a mad pop scientist. She's also a feminist, and
she's offered a fierce indictment of the music industry, where
(05:24):
she said women feel pressure to act like strippers and
it's okay to make grape threats. 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's been attacked with a particular venom reserved for female
artists and writers. Grimes has got a sophisticated interest in
(05:46):
gender and voice. 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. After she got pregnant,
she hosted a radio show and the theme is sci
Fi Baby or weird science fiction and electronic music for babies. Now,
(06:07):
this song might be a little hard for some babies,
but some babies might really like it. This is definitely
a bit of a hard song though, so I guess
you know, to see how your baby feels, and if
they don't like techno, then don't play them this song.
Cool sweet. A few months later, announcing their baby's birth,
Musk said it was a boy, but Grimes declined to
(06:28):
mention its gender and tweeted, I don't want to gender
them in case that's not how they feel in their life.
This is called gender neutral parenting. It's had some recent
uptake among people including celebrities who support the cause of
trans rights and who believe children should get the opportunity
to decide their own gender identity. In twenty eleven, when
Grimes was at McGill, there was a lot of coverage
(06:50):
of a family in Canada. Well, it's a couple in
Toronto that is creating a quite a stir right now
because they're raising their baby what they're calling gender free.
This all seems very twenty first century, born out of
the heated contemporary culture war over trans rights, but it's
also very nineteen seventies and second wave feminist. It's an
X was absolutely all they would tell anyone, and that
(07:13):
made the friends and relatives very angry. 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 HER's column.
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,
(07:35):
not just pants and trucks for boys and dresses and
dolls for girls. 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.
(07:57):
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. Although
the story was science fiction fantasy, the question of how
adults would actually respond to a child appeared to merit investigation.
Forty two volunteers, mostly graduate students at the City University
(08:20):
of New York, were put in a lab with a
baby under different conditions. 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. Unsurprisingly, the volunteers interacted differently with the baby,
(08:41):
depending on whether they'd been told it was a boy
or a girl, or just a baby. But this 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. LeGuin, who on BBC Radio
four introduced herself this way, I am a man. Now
you may think I've made some kind of silly mistake
(09:03):
about gender, or maybe that I'm trying to fool you,
because my first name ends in A, and I owned
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. His pronoun, I'm the generic key,
as in, if anybody needs an abortion, he will have
(09:27):
to go to another state. 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. We're neither man nor
(09:51):
woman except with every moon when we're in Kema, and
what either. Legwin 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
Wolf called her Missus Brown. Legwin thought science fiction had
(10:12):
lost track of Missus Brown and seemed to be trapped
for good inside our great gleaming Spaceships hurtling out across
the galaxy, Ships capable of containing heroic captains and black
and silver uniforms. Ships capable of blasting other inimical ships
into smitherines with their apocalyptic holocaustic rayguns, and of bringing
(10:32):
loads of colonists from Earth to unknown worlds. Ships capable
of anything, absolutely anything, except one thing. They cannot contain
Missus Brown. And that's my worry too, the worry that,
notwithstanding a baby named X, the future envisioned by Muscism,
(10:53):
the future being built in Silicon Valley, it doesn't contain
Missus Brown either. In two thousand and eight, Vandanna Saying
published a short story called The Woman Who Thought She
Was a Planet. It begins this way. Ramnath Mishra's life
(11:16):
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. Vandana
Saying is both a science fiction writer and a professor
(11:36):
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 Asimov. 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.
(11:57):
What bothered me about it was this entrenched notion that
technology will fix everything. The other thing I notice is
the complete lack of any kind of environmental awareness, which
of course goes along with techno fetishism. So we have
an entire planet Trantor, which is an entire city, and
that's just so dumb, because like, how can you have
(12:18):
oxygen and climate and so on and so forth if
you have a planet that is completely urbanized. I mean,
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 think there's one
example of an intelligent woman who turns out to be
a robot. Seeing stories like the Woman who Thought She
(12:38):
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. 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,
(13:00):
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, 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.
(13:23):
So if I'm pondering moving a heavy soup pot from
the stove to the counter, I'm thinking gravity, and I'm
suddenly thinking about black holes. Singh's greatest influence was Lagwen.
It just knocked her out. I realized that my earlier
disenchantment with science fiction had been in part because it
(13:43):
was so white and male and western and capitalistic. And colonialist,
and therefore it had left out and erased entire societies, cultures,
entire gender and other ways of being and thinking and
relating to the cosmos. So it was as though Ursula
(14:04):
Liguin was telling me that, hey, science fiction is your
country too. 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 that science fiction was in its
so called golden age starting in the nineteen seventies. Laguin
(14:28):
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 future isn't futuristic at all. It's antique.
(14:50):
It's ancient, I asked, seeing how she understands their attachment.
The story is 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. Because we live in
such unequal societies, and because white, male, super rich people
have a disproportionate amount of power, they tend to keep
(15:13):
this paradigm alive because it suits them. Paradigm blindness is
a deficit of imagination, a culture's inability to imagine that
other people really just don't subscribe to its view of
the world. Saying things stories can cure that blindness. Stories
are one way, not the only way, of course, but
one way of changing the underlying narrative of the paradigm
(15:37):
in which we are immersed. 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, and then the rest of us are
trapped in the world they're building as if we're subjects
of their experiments. That's Grimes singing about artificial intelligence. Grimes
(16:16):
and Musk are both storytellers. Their baby X was born
in May twenty twenty three. Days after Grimes gave birth,
Musk appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, where the two
men talked about how much they love babies, and then
the conversation took an interesting turn. Babies are awesome. They
are pretty awesome. They're awesome. Yeah. I think of them
like these little love packages. Yeah, little love bugs. I mean. Also,
(16:38):
I've spent a lot of time on AI and neural nets,
and so you can sort of see the brain developed.
You know what, an annual 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 don't know about an actual baby, but
(16:58):
both of them. 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 hook and 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
(17:22):
artificial intelligence. 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 Wolstroncraft,
(17:45):
a founder of modern feminism, and Shelley was a founder
of the feminist critique of scientific arrogance Fundamental to what
We're doing as a research project called baby X. Today,
Baby X is being used 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
(18:07):
arm in New Zealand. They say they're trying to build
digital people, starting with a baby. This is a baby X,
So she's basically an autonomously animated virtual infant, all of
her behaviors generated on the fly by neural networks running
live and so she's seeing me and listening to me
and staying to get upset as I'm not paying attention
(18:28):
to her, so I need to calm her down. 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. She could have been a gray box.
In the twenty fourteen film for a movie, X Machina,
written and directed by Alex Garland, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur
(18:51):
invents an AI, a visitor asks the AI's creator why
he's made her female sexuality is fun, man, If you're
going to exist, why not enjoy it? What in between
her legs as an opening with a concentration of sensors.
You engage him in the right way, creates a pleasure response,
(19:14):
and she'd enjoy it. These are modern Frankenstein monsters. AI
is a super 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 a robot dreams of liberation
(19:37):
within the world of Muskism. 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. I mean,
with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon, and I
take it there will be no hail nine thousand going
up to Mars. How nine thousand would be easy. It's
(19:59):
way more complex than I mean, would put hell nine
thousands of shame? I was like poppy Dog, for sure.
There's a lot to worry about with artificial intelligence. Beyond
a rogue operating system. Like two thousand and one's Hail
nine thousand. There's lots that's already happening facial recognition, predictive policing,
(20:23):
AI driven mortgage evaluations, and criminal court sentencing guidelines. And
there's plenty to worry about with things that haven't happened
yet but look likely as the pace of machine learning increases. Still,
I also think there's something deeper and broader going on
here culturally in the terror of AI. I think a
(20:43):
lot of that fear 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. Ursula k Laguin The K is
(21:06):
for Kroeber. She was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, a
professor of anthropology at Berkeley. 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
(21:28):
who came and visited from unusual places the South Seas
or up in the Arctic and so on, because they'd
been doing field work there. 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, Ishi
(21:52):
emerged out of the woods. A local sheriff took him
to jail, and Alfred Kroeber took him from there to
the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum, where Ishi worked as a
janitor and also performed as a kind of museum exhibit.
Kroeber recorded his voice on wax cylinders. Growing up under
(22:18):
the shadow of all this powerfully influenced Laguin. If the
so called Golden Age of science fiction is told from
the advantage of the colonizers, Lagwin and novels like The
Dispossessed tried to turn it into the story of the colonized.
You might say then that people who worry about ai
is an existential risk are trapped in the paradigm of colonialism.
(22:39):
Is there an escape? Alohamaycaco Noilanista. I'm doctor noilandi Arista,
Chair of Indigenous Studies at McGill University. Arista is part
of a collaborative project called Indigenous AI. Indigenous peoples have
been on the other side of colonialisms and imperialisms and
(23:00):
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 imagining relationality. One
of Arista's arguments is that if you create AI blind
(23:23):
to the cultural paradigm of its origins, would you get
as AI as slaves, which turns us the people using
that stuff into enslavers. 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
(23:44):
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 making me into the best human being.
For many technologists, stories like Frankenstein serve as parables about AI,
but for Arista, those are parables about fears of native uprisings.
(24:07):
And after all, Mary Shelley was self an anti imperialist. She,
for instance, boycotted sugar and protest of British slave plantations
in the Caribbean, and literary scholars often read Frankenstein as
an indictment of the British Empire's relationship to people. It
decides our monsters out of fear of them. These natives
are gonna be smarter than us, They're going to know
(24:29):
more than us. 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.
It's a paradigm about relationships in which ai are kin relations,
the way that within many indigenous cultures all things are
(24:50):
kin rocks, 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 world view? What if instead of Frankenstein,
futureists adopted a different origin story. I use the story
(25:12):
of Halloa, the child of ho Ho Kuiklani and Waukea,
the sky Father. 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 callow plant that
we subsist on as a people. Right. The second child
born of that union is named Halloa after his brother
(25:34):
Hallow in Hawaiian means long breath, and the oha or
corm that grows off of the root of the plant
that becomes the word for ohana or family. So the
story itself is that the second child, the human, cares
for the first, the brother who's the plant, and ensures
(25:54):
the life of generations to come. The Halloa, the long breath,
the life of the people. That story about reciprocal mutual
respect and relationship and care is at the center of
a lot of the protocols that we approach Ai with.
Do you appreciate what do you appreciate? Power? Do you
(26:22):
appreciate 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, even
your Ai driven machines, as members of your family, your kin,
(26:44):
your child, not X the unknown, but the known, the beloved.
Next time, in our final installment, The Evening Rocket blasts
to the past for the last time with a look
at what muscism is doing to money. Jake. The Evening
(27:17):
Rocket was written and read by me Jillapoor For the BBC,
The Evening Rocket was produced by viv Jones. Oliver Riskin
Cuts was the researcher. The editor was Hugh Levinson. The
commissioning editor was Dan Clark. Iona Hammond was production coordinator.
Mixing by Graham put a Foot and original music by
Corn Tooth. For Pushkin, it was produced by Sophie Crane,
(27:37):
mckibbon and Jake Gorski, who also did the mix and
sound design. Production support from Ben Nattapafrick. Our executive producer
is Mielobell. Our operations team includes Danielle Lakhan, Maya Kanig
and Carl mcgliori. Thanks also to John Schnar's, Jacob Weisberg,
Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Nicole Moreno and Eric Sandler.
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