The Artificial Intelligence Revolution: Part 1. PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing.
Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. It hit me pretty quickly that what’s happening in the world of AI is not just an important topic, but by far THE most important topic for our future. So I wanted to learn as much as I could about it, and once I did that, I wanted to make sure I wrote a post that really explained this whole situation and why it matters so much. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. — Vernor Vinge What does it feel like to stand here? It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing—but then you have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right. Which probably feels pretty normal… The Far Future—Coming Soon This works on smaller scales too. 1. It's Time For People to Stop Using the Social Construct of "Biological Sex" to Defend Their Transmisogyny.
Time and time again, transmisogynists and transphobes go back to that old excuse that they are just standing up for the reality of “biological sex” when they spew their ignorance and hate.
They say that no matter what a trans woman does, no matter what she believes, she’s still actually a man. Others cede the fact that trans women are women, but stop there and say “gender is what’s between your ears, sex is what’s between your legs” and therefore trans women are still males. Although this is a popular idea, it is based on a misunderstanding of biology, social constructs and anatomy, and it needs to stop. via Time. The Age of Hyper-Racism: White Supremacy as the White Knight of Capitalism. (Image: Jared Rodriguez / Truthout)Think the world needs an alternative to corporate media?
Click here to make a tax-deductible donation to Truthout and keep independent journalism strong. We've heard the argument over and over. "Of course we're in a post-racial society; racism is over; slavery is long gone; the president is black, etc. " And then we've heard the counterargument over and over. "Post-racial?! The Case for Reparations by Ta-Nehisi Coates. And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee.
And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today. — Deuteronomy 15: 12–15 — John Locke, “Second Treatise” By our unpaid labor and suffering, we have earned the right to the soil, many times over and over, and now we are determined to have it. — Anonymous, 1861 I.
Clyde Ross was born in 1923, the seventh of 13 children, near Clarksdale, Mississippi, the home of the blues. In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. This was hardly unusual. 'Between the World and Me' by Ta-Nehisi Coates. And have brought humanity to the edge of oblivion: because they think they are white.
—James Baldwin Son, Last Sunday the host of a popular news show asked me what it meant to lose my body. The host was broadcasting from Washington, D.C., and I was seated in a remote studio on the Far West Side of Manhattan. Racism Against White People. I had a pretty awesome Fourth, mainly because I spent the morning interviewing James McPherson for a forthcoming piece.
I don't want to say too much more on that front, in prepping for the interview I went back over a lot of McPherson's work. This essay on how Southern intellectuals, in the run up to the war, began to argue that they were a different "race" than Northern whites is really fascinating. Take Down the Confederate Flag. Last night, Dylann Roof walked into a Charleston church, sat for an hour, and then killed nine people.
Roof’s crime cannot be divorced from the ideology of white supremacy which long animated his state nor from its potent symbol—the Confederate flag. Visitors to Charleston have long been treated to South Carolina’s attempt to clean its history and depict its secession as something other than a war to guarantee the enslavement of the majority of its residents. This notion is belied by any serious interrogation of the Civil War and the primary documents of its instigators. Yet the Confederate battle flag—the flag of Dylann Roof—still flies on the Capitol grounds in Columbia.