Well if your anxiety plate was not already full, how about a machine driven take over of the world? Unlikely, but yet another dystopian vision of the future that we humans could potentially realize. Yay Us!
“And of course, that’s almost the good news when, with our present all-too-Trumpian world in mind, you begin to think about how Artificial Intelligence might make political and social fools of us all. Given that I’m anything but one of the better-informed people when it comes to AI (though on Less Than Artificial Intelligence I would claim to know a fair amount more), I’m relieved not to be alone in my fears.
In fact, among those who have spoken out fearfully on the subject is the man known as “the godfather of AI,” Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. He only recently quit his job at Google to express his fears about where we might indeed be heading, artificially speaking. As he told the New York Times recently, “The idea that this stuff could actually get smarter than people — a few people believed that, but most people thought it was way off. And I thought it was way off. I thought it was 30 to 50 years or even longer away. Obviously, I no longer think that.”
Now, he fears not just the coming of killer robots beyond human control but, as he told Geoff Bennett of the PBS NewsHour, “the risk of super intelligent AI taking over control from people… I think it’s an area in which we can actually have international collaboration, because the machines taking over is a threat for everybody. It’s a threat for the Chinese and for the Americans and for the Europeans, just like a global nuclear war was.”
Our brains are weird. It works though, if you aim for the path between the obstacles rather than not hitting them, it works out waaaaay better :)
After thirty one years I’m pretty much done with the Canadian political left. The NDP is faux-activist driven and impotent while the Liberals are roughly the same as the Conservatives but delight in erasing females from Canadian society under the guise of ‘gender inclusiveness’ (gross!).
Let’s be honest the PPC are just a little too crazy around the edges to be a viable political force in Canada. However the Canadian Centrist party seems like a fairly sane and rational choice. This snippet from their website –
“There is no political party in Canada that has a balanced approach to critical issues faced by all Canadians today, and hence there is dire need of a political platform which provides Centrist, the most practical and pragmatic approach to problems faced by Canadians. Centrist Party’s vision is to provide transparent government leading to economic prosperity and strong united Canada.
All political parties in Canada either follow a right or left political ideology and they are quite divided in their approach toward economical and social issues. Liberal Party, NDP and Green Party are considered left wing parties. Conservative Party, and other Right wing parties use fear mongering, anti-minority and anti-indigenous rhetoric, whereas left- wing parties are against developing our natural resources and have become too much extremist in their approach to social issues”
So yeah, not bad. However there is another, still nascent party, waiting in the wings. The Centre Ice Conservatives this is part of their bit.
“We are a platform that intends to be a strong, bold and proud voice for the centre-right of Canada’s political spectrum.
Why are we doing this? Because we don’t want the centre to be marginalized and ignored any longer. And because our voice – your voice – firmly focused on the priorities of mainstream Canadians, is badly needed today. More than ever.
Why is that?
Because “woke” voices on the edges of the left and “populist” voices on the fringes of the right are sucking up all the oxygen in what passes for political debate in Canada. And Canada is worse off for it. These loud and fringe voices dominate Party politics, creating tribal divisions and fierce debates over issues mainly long-settled in the minds of most Canadians.
That leaves most of us in the middle scratching our heads, wondering “Who speaks for us?”.
It seems like the Canadian Centrist Party and the Centre Ice Party should get together and have a chat.
“Soon, I learned about nonbinary identities, and that some people – many people – were literally arguing that sex, not gender, was a social construct. I met people who evangelised a denomination of transgenderism that I had never heard of, one that included people who had never been gender dysphoric and who had no desire to medically transition. I met straight people whose ‘trans / nonbinary’ identities seemed to be defined by their haircuts, outfits and inchoate politics. I met straight women with Grindr accounts, and listened to them complain about the ‘transphobic’ gay men who didn’t want to have sex with women.
All around me, it seemed, straight people were spontaneously identifying into my community and then policing our behaviours and customs. I began to think that this broadening of the ‘trans’ and ‘queer’ umbrella was giving a hell of a lot of people a free pass to express their homophobia.
At Columbia, I took classes on LGBT history, but much of that history was delivered through the lens of queer theory. Queer theorists appropriate French philosopher Michel Foucault’s ideas about the power of language in constructing reality. They argue that homosexuality didn’t exist prior to the late 19th century, when the word ‘homosexual’ first appeared in medical discourse. Queer theorists proselytise a liberation that supposedly results from challenging the concepts of empirical reality and ‘normativity’. But their converts instead often end up adrift in a sea of nihilism. Queer theory, which has become the predominant method of discussing and analysing gender and sexuality in universities, seemed to me to be more ideological than truthful.
In my classes on gender and sexuality in the Muslim world, however, I discovered something else, too. I learned about current medical practices in Iran, where gay sex is illegal and punishable by death, and where medical transition is subsidised by the state to ‘cure’ gays and lesbians who, the theocratic elite insists, are ‘normal’ people ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’. I privately drew parallels between the anti-gay laws and practices of Iran and what I saw developing in the West, but I convinced myself I was just being paranoid.
Then, I learned about what was happening to gender-nonconforming kids – that they were being prescribed off-label drugs to halt their natural development, so that they’d have time to decide if they were really transgender. If so, they would then be more successful at passing as the opposite sex in adulthood. Even worse, I learned that these practices were being touted by LGBT-rights organisations as ‘life-saving medical care’.
It felt like I was living in an episode of The Twilight Zone. How long were these kids supposed to remain on the blockers? And what happens in a few years, if they decide they’re not ‘truly trans’ after all, and all of their peers have surpassed them? Are they seriously supposed to commence puberty at 16 or 17 years of age? These questions rattled my brain for months, until I learned the actual statistics: nearly all children who are prescribed puberty blockers go on to receive cross-sex hormones. Blockers don’t give a kid time to think. They solidify him in a trans identity and sentence him to a lifetime of very expensive, experimental medicalisation.
I wondered how different these so-called trans kids were from the little boy I had been. Obviously, I grew up to be a gay man and not a transwoman. But how could gender clinicians tell the difference between a young boy expressing his homosexuality through gender nonconformity, and someone ‘born in the wrong body’? I decided to dig deeper into the real history of medical transition.”
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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