How we get to next – Needull in a haystack

Alicia Vikander in Ex Machina (2015).

Is it possible for AI to have emotional intelligence? Is it even important?

We’ve long been thinking about how AI might be able to take over some of this work, whether it’s tending to the mysteries of the human heart or the existential, daily burdens of an unjust society. Robot therapists, butlers, maids, nurses, and sex dolls are familiar components of the techno-utopian future fantasy, where dutiful machines perform all our undesirable chores, while we enjoy lives of leisure. But these familiar dynamics may actually be about nurturance and care just as much, and perhaps even more, than they are about service or labor.

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Leigh Alexander — How we get to next

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women-coders-1

Today’s needull looks at learning skills from a different perspective. The needull advises ” to break from the framework passed down to us from the Industrial Revolution — a framework that has segregated and diminished opportunities for women for almost two centuries.”

By the time all these young women (and homeless people, and people of color, and anyone else who’s supposed to jump on this learn-to-code bandwagon) have actually learned to code, the work will be standardized, rote, and repetitive, as it was when women were hired in the early days of programming. Not surprisingly, pay scales will plummet as more women enter the field. By then, men will have moved on to something else entirely.

Maybe it’s time for women to move on to something else, too? Women shouldn’t be fighting for a place at work; they should be inventing, designing, prototyping, and coding a new ideal of work—something which isn’t based on an out-dated belief about gender roles in society.

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Mrs Smith — How we get to next

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