Dystopias

“Human beings can never get rid of the interference of hormones or glucose.”

“It would not even consider the moral factors that conflict with strategic goals,”

“If one side of the strategic game has artificial intelligence technology, and the other side does not, then this kind of strategic game is almost a one-way, transparent confrontation,” he said. “The actors lacking the assistance of AI will be at an absolute disadvantage in many aspects such as risk judgment, strategy selection, decision making and execution efficiency, and decision-making reliability,” he said.

“The entire strategic game structure will be completely out of balance.”

“AI can think many steps ahead of a human. It can think deeply in many possible scenarios and come up with the best strategy,”

A US Department of State spokesman said the agency had “many technological tools” to help it make decisions. There was, however, no specific information on AI that could be shared with the public,

The system, also known as geopolitical environment simulation and prediction platform, was used to vet “nearly all foreign investment projects” in recent years

One challenge to the development of AI policymaker is data sharing among Chinese government agencies. The foreign ministry, for instance, had been unable to get some data sets it needed because of administrative barriers

China is aggressively pushing AI into many sectors. The government is building a nationwide surveillance system capable of identifying any citizen by face within seconds. Research is also under way to introduce AI in nuclear submarines to help commanders making faster, more accurate decision in battle.

“AI can help us get more prepared for unexpected events. It can help find a scientific, rigorous solution within a short time.

No one else gets to pretend their politics are free of identity. White people do. But simply saying the words “white people” is a direct attack on that illusion. It identifies, i.e., creates (or rather, exposes) an identity, a group with shared characteristics and interests. It raises questions (and doubts) about the group’s standing and power relative to other groups. It illuminates all that hidden baggage. Lots of white people really hate that

it’s difficult to think of a US setting in which the words “white people” are received neutrally. The term is always charged somehow, freighted with meaning and potential conflict, vaguely subversive

As many have pointed out and this political era has made painfully clear, to a dominant demographic, the loss of privilege feels like persecution. Being just one group among many feels like losing. After all, what good is being white in the US, especially among poor whites, if some third-generation Ugandan immigrant has just as much control over their fate as they have over hers? If a poll asks whether they’re any good for her, rather than the other way around?

"The use of facial recognition in schools creates an unprecedented level of surveillance and scrutiny," says John Cusick, a fellow at the Legal Defense Fund. "It can exacerbate racial disparities in terms of how schools are enforcing disciplinary codes and monitoring their students."

The school would ask adults, not kids, to register their faces with the SAFR system. After they registered, they’d be able to enter the school by smiling at a camera at the front gate. (Smiling tells the software that it’s looking at a live person and not, for instance, a photograph). If the system recognizes the person, the gates automatically unlock

The software can predict a person's age and gender, enabling schools to turn off access for people below a certain age. But Glaser notes that if other schools want to register students going forward, they can

There are no guidelines about how long the facial data gets stored, how it’s used, or whether people need to opt in to be tracked.

Schools could, for instance, use facial recognition technology to monitor who's associating with whom and discipline students differently as a result. "It could criminalize friendships," says Cusick of the Legal Defense Fund.

SAFR boasts a 99.8 percent overall accuracy rating, based on a test, created by the University of Massachusetts, that vets facial recognition systems. But Glaser says the company hasn’t tested whether the tool is as good at recognizing black and brown faces as it is at recognizing white ones. RealNetworks deliberately opted not to have the software proactively predict ethnicity, the way it predicts age and gender, for fear of it being used for racial profiling. Still, testing the tool's accuracy among different demographics is key. Research has shown that many top facial recognition tools are particularly bad at recognizing black women

"It's tempting to say there's a technological solution, that we're going to find the dangerous people, and we're going to stop them," she says. "But I do think a large part of that is grasping at straws."

self-driving cars will only work at the price of total conformity of every member of society. Such a system of mobility will depend on everyone behaving with no exceptions. As exemplified by self-driving cars, there is a built-in authoritarianism in this managed space of flows we call cyberspace

Intelligent life flourishes most in the diversity of those unmanaged spaces that are, by definition, outside efficiency. That has been the history of the development of diverse life forms, and that has been the history of the culture of cities.

Companies accumulate wealth by taking it from people with less power through various means of subterfuge (that we call it marketing is, in and of itself, marketing), which, even on a small scale, is an activity necessarily uninterested in equality. If capitalism could deliver economic parity — if parity was even part of the ideology’s intent, which it’s not — then Latinx women wouldn’t still make 54 cents on a white man’s dollar several hundred years into the American capitalist experiment.

Capitalism is an apparatus that convinced a whole culture that then-worthless clear rocks were the only real way to tell a woman you wanted to marry her, so convincing us that buying a T-shirt from a creep (or from union busters, or polluters, or whoever) is the same as being politically active is comparatively light work

Even though there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism, that doesn’t mean all consumer choices are the same. Companies can’t be feminist, but their leaders can make choices that operate on feminist values, like supporting the unionization of their workforces and providing fair wages and comprehensive health care and family leave to all workers. When possible, taking your business to those companies is an ethically superior choice. Capitalism is a global economic order that’s impossible to opt out of on an individual consumer level, but it’s possible to make some of the individual choices therein with integrity, even if you understand that doing so doesn’t move the dial as political action.

the only clear-eyed way to regard a corporation is, at best, as an adversary

Making a buck from the alt-right is quite simple. Get a blog or a YouTube channel. Then under the guise of political dialogue or pseudo-science, start spouting hate speech. You'll soon find followers flocking to your banner.

Publish a crappy ebook explaining why SJWs Always Lie. Or teach your followers how to “think like a silverback gorilla” (surely an arena where the far right already triumph?) via a pricey seminar. Launch a Kickstarter for a badly drawn comic packed with anti-diversity propaganda. They'll sell by the bucketload to followers eager to virtue-signal their membership in the rank and file of the alt-right

the seemingly bottomless reservoirs of white male victimhood

nowhere is there a better supply of the credulous than among the angry white men who flock to the far right. Embittered by their own life failures, the alt-right follower is eager to believe they have a genetically superior IQ and are simply the victim of a libtard conspiracy to keep them down

We're barely in the foothills of the mountains of madness that the internet and social media are unleashing into our political process. If you think petty demagogues like Jordan Peterson are good at milking cash from the crowd, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Because he was just the beginning – and his ideology of the white male victim is rapidly spiralling into something that even he can no longer control

Henry James did the limited third person really well, showing us the way to do it. He milked that cow successfully. And it’s a great cow, it still gives lots of milk. But if you read only contemporary stuff, always third-person limited, you don’t realize that point of view in a story is very important and can be very movable. It’s here where I suggest that people read books like Woolf’s To the Lighthouse to see what she does by moving from mind to mind. Or Tolstoy’s War and Peace for goodness’ sake. Wow. The way he slides from one point of view to another without you knowing that you’ve changed point of view—he does it so gracefully. You know where you are, whose eyes you are seeing through, but you don’t have the sense of being jerked from place to place. That’s mastery of a craft.

Any of us who grew up reading eighteenth- or nineteenth-century fiction are perfectly at home with what is called “omniscience.” I myself call it “authorial” point of view because the term “omnisicence,” the idea of an author being omniscient, is so often used in a judgmental way, as if it were a bad thing. But the author, after all, is the author of all these characters, the maker, the inventor of them. In fact all the characters are the author if you come right down to the honest truth of it. So the author has the perfect right to know what they’re thinking. If the author doesn’t tell you what they are thinking … why? This is worth thinking about. Often it’s simply to spin out suspense by not telling you what the author knows. Well, that’s legitimate. This is art. But I’m trying to get people to think about their choices here, because there are so many beautiful choices that are going unused. In a way, first person and limited third are the easiest ones, the least interesting. 

to preach that story is conflict, always to ask, “Where’s the conflict in your story?”—this needs some thinking about. If you say that story is about conflict, that plot must be based on conflict, you’re limiting your view of the world severely. And in a sense making a political statement: that life is conflict, so in stories conflict is all that really matters. This is simply untrue. To see life as a battle is a narrow, social-Darwinist view, and a very masculine one. Conflict, of course, is part of life, I’m not saying you should try to keep it out of your stories, just that it’s not their only lifeblood. Stories are about a lot of different things

The first decade of her career, beginning in the sixties, included some of her most well-known works of fiction: A Wizard of Earthsea, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and The Lathe of Heaven. Each of these works imagined not just worlds, but homes, homes that became real for her readers, homes where protagonists were women, people of color, gender fluid, anticapitalist—imaginary homes that did not simply spin out our worst dystopic fears for the future like so many of the apocalyptic novels of today, but also modeled other ways of being, other ways to create home.

“Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren’t real,” Le Guin once said. “But they also know that books about unicorns, if they are good books, are true books.”

“Fake rules” and “alternative facts” are used in our time not to increase moral understanding and social possibility but to increase power for those who already have it. A war on language has unhinged words from their meaning, language from its capacity as truth-teller. But perhaps, counterintuitively, it is in the realm of the imagination, the fictive, where we can best re-ground ourselves in the real and the true.

you can’t find your own voice if you aren’t listening for it. The sound of your writing is an essential part of what it’s doing. Our teaching of writing tends to ignore it, except maybe in poetry. And so we get prose that goes clunk, clunk, clunk. And we don’t know what’s wrong with it

You emphasize the importance of understanding grammar and grammar terminology but also the importance of interrogating its rules. You point out that it is a strange phenomenon that grammar is the tool of our trade and yet so many writers steer away from an engagement with it. In my generation and for a while after—I was born in 1929—we were taught grammar right from the start. It was quietly drilled into us. We knew the names of the parts of speech, we had a working acquaintance with how English works, which they don’t get in most schools anymore. There is so much less reading in schools, and very little teaching of grammar. For a writer this is kind of like being thrown into a carpenter’s shop without ever having learned the names of the tools or handled them consciously. What do you do with a Phillips screwdriver? What is a Phillips screwdriver? We’re not equipping people to write; we’re just saying, “You too can write!” or “Anybody can write, just sit down and do it!” But to make anything, you’ve got to have the tools to make it.

In your book on writing, Steering the Craft, you say that morality and language are linked, but that morality and correctness are not the same thing. Yet we often confuse them in the realm of grammar. The “grammar bullies”—you read them in places like the New York Times—and they tell you what is correct: You must never use “hopefully.” “Hopefully, we will be going there on Tuesday.” That is incorrect and wrong and you are basically an ignorant pig if you say it. This is judgmentalism. The game that is being played there is a game of social class. It has nothing to do with the morality of writing and speaking and thinking clearly, which Orwell, for instance, talked about so well. It’s just affirming that I am from a higher class than you are. The trouble is that people who aren’t taught grammar very well in school fall for these statements from these pundits, delivered with vast authority from above. I’m fighting that. A very interesting case in point is using “they” as a singular. This offends the grammar bullies endlessly; it is wrong, wrong, wrong! Well, it was right until the eighteenth century, when they invented the rule that “he” includes “she.” It didn’t exist in English before then; Shakespeare used “they” instead of “he or she”—we all do, we always have done, in speaking, in colloquial English. It took the women’s movement to bring it back to English literature. And it is important. Because it’s a crossroads between correctness bullying and the moral use of language. If “he” includes “she” but “she” doesn’t include “he,” a big statement is being made, with huge social and moral implications. But we don’t have to use “he” that way—we’ve got “they.” Why not use it?