A lot of mockery has been made of Google Gemini. Zvi has a round-up here, but I’ll also quote from (thus acknowledging her existence for the first time) Grimes’ ironic appreciation: “offensive to all, comforting to none […] Art for no one, by no one”. Of course, anyone aware of earlier AIs knows that actual humans reacted against these models sucking up data and recapitulating stereotypes, thus imposing there rather heavy-handed anti-stereotype interventions on top of it. A comparison to the TV series “Bridgerton” was made, because there is actually demand for that sort of ahistorical diversity (something I’d noticed in remakes of classic stories).

This same month, Ginevra Davis reviewed Emmanuel Todd’s “Lineages of the Feminine”, in which she pronounced that feminism had achieved its goals of removing societal barriers to women but that the fundamental facts of having a female body still mean women are “still vastly underrepresented at the very, very top of capitalistic success—the economic equivalent of what [Simone] Beavoir calls “greatness.”” Prior to feminism this would have just been accepted, but now is a disappointment. She imagines a future in which reproductive technology advances enough to fully remove that burden from women and “I think that would be such a funny way for feminism to end—if someday, we get artificial wombs, and parents get to choose the body of their child, and they all choose “male,” and females can be, at long last, wiped from the face of the earth”.

Medical technology is infamously regulated because people care so much (irrationally, as so much of it is wasteful). Peter Thiel is well known for arguing that we’ve had stagnating innovation in manipulation of “atoms” generally because of regulation, while the IT revolution left few constraints on manipulation of “bits”. Since then Congress has gotten more concerned about Big Tech, with both sides of the aisle getting more negative on it (Ted Cruz being something of an exception who warns of us making Europe’s mistake). Congress, activists, and all other inhabitants of far mode may have little ability to reshape the real world as they wish, but they can at least get AI to lie to us about the world, depicting it as they have failed to make it. As people spend more and more time in front of screens, perceiving mediated rather than direct reality, this false world of pleasing fantasies will grow in importance to the real one that has failed to live up to our modern standards.