Kirsten and I spent the week between the 17th and the 21st of September with 18 other utterly amazing people having Chatham House Rule-governed conversations about the Future of Artificial Intelligence.
We were in Norway, in the Juvet Landscape Hotel, which is where they filmed a lot of the movie Ex Machina, and it is even more gorgeous in person. None of the rooms shown in the film share a single building space. It’s astounding as a place of both striking architectural sensibility and also natural integration as they built every structure in the winter to allow the dormancy cycles of the plants and animals to dictate when and where they could build, rather than cutting anything down.
And on our first full day here, Two Ravens flew directly over my and Kirsten’s heads.
Yes.
[Image of a rainbow rising over a bend in a river across a patchy overcast sky, with the river going between two outcropping boulders, trees in the foreground and on either bank and stretching off into the distance, and absolutely enormous mountains in the background][/caption]
I am extraordinarily grateful to Andy Budd and the other members of the Clear Left team for organizing this, and to Cennydd Bowles for opening the space for me to be able to attend, and being so forcefully enthused about the prospect of my attending that he came to me with a full set of strategies in hand to get me to this place. That kind of having someone in your corner means the world for a whole host of personal reasons, but also more general psychological and socially important ones, as well.
I am a fortunate person. I am a person who has friends and resources and a bloody-minded stubbornness that means that when I determine to do something, it will more likely than not get fucking done, for good or ill.
I am a person who has been given opportunities to be in places many people will never get to see, and have conversations with people who are often considered legends in their fields, and start projects that could very well alter the shape of the world on a massive scale.
Yeah, that’s a bit of a grandiose statement, but you’re here reading this, and so you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done.
I am a person who tries to pay forward what I have been given and to create as many spaces for people to have the opportunities that I have been able to have.
I am not a monetarily wealthy person, measured against my society, but my wealth and fortune are things that strike me still and make me take stock of it all and what it can mean and do, all over again, at least once a week, if not once a day, as I sit in tension with who I am, how the world perceives me, and what amazing and ridiculous things I have had, been given, and created the space to do, because and in violent spite of it all.
So when I and others come together and say we’re going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected BY the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds, then we are going to have to talk about how intersectional oppression and the lived experiences of marginalized peoples affect, effect, and are affected and effected by the wider techoscientific/sociotechnical/sociopolitical/socioeconomic world and what that means for how we design, build, train, rear, and regard machine minds.
As you already know, we went to the second Juvet A.I. Retreat, back in September. If you want to hear several of us talk about what we got up to at the then you’re in luck because here are several conversations conducted by Ben Byford of the Machine Ethics Podcast.
I am deeply grateful to Ben Byford for asking me to sit down and talk about this with him. I talk a great deal, and am surprisingly able to (cogently?) get on almost
all of my bullshit—technology and magic and the occult, nonhuman personhood, the sham of gender and race and other social constructions of expected lived categories, the invisible architecture of bias, neurodiversity, and philosophy of mind—in a rather short window of time.
Hello from the Southern Blue Mountains of These Soon To Be Re-United States.
I realised that, for someone whose work and life and public face is as much about magic as mine is, I haven’t done a lot of intention- and will-setting, here. That is, I haven’t stated and formulated with a clear mind and intention what I want and will work to bring into existence.
Now, there are a lot of magical schools of thought that go in for the power of setting your intention, abstracting it out from yourself, and putting it into the universe as a kind of unconscious signal. Sigilizing, “let go and let god,” that whole kind of thing.
But there’s also something to be said for just straight-up clearly formulating the concepts and words to state what you want, and fixing your mind on what it will take to achieve. So here’s what I want, in 2019…
whenever i see a baby in public i wish i were like a powerful faerie god mother character who could give the baby a gift like “you’ll never get a cold” or “math will always make sense to you” or something like bein’ great with string instruments but I don’t have any powers that I know of but it doesn’t stop me from trying so every time I see a baby in public I tell the adult with it “what a beautiful baby” and it makes them smile and then I pretend I can take the goodness of their smile and I look at the baby and I think very hard “you will have a good life, even if it’s hard, you will end up happy” and I’m just hopin’ the magic kicks in at some point
faerie: for your service, I will grant you one boon
Since the 17th about 12 of my posts where flagged as adult content and when I went to try and appeal it there was no appeal button. I went through their help and read the whole article. I even contacted support who then copied and pasted their help page not even trying to assist me. All I know is that there was supposed to be a button for the original creator to click and allow up to appeal but there wasn’t.
On my computer:
On the app:
See no button for appeal.
It has taken me days to figure out this work around and I thought some other people out there might be having this issue.
Now here is how you appeal your post when you don’t have the appeal button
Now go through your blog and find all your pages with censored posts clicking on them to take you to the original post.
The villains in The Addams Family movies aren’t “Normal” people. They’re disingenuous people who hide the truth of themselves. The fact that that kind of behaviour gets equated with “normalcy” is a major component of the commentary.
Tully AND Debbie would’ve been welcome, if they’d just been honest with and About themselves.
“You’re a desperate woman, consumed by greed and Bitterness. We could’ve been Such Friends.”
“Tully Alford: Charlatan; deadbeat; parasite. How Gomez Adored you… And, dear Fester, which is the real you:
the loathsome, underhanded monster you’ve become,
or the loathsome, underhanded monster we came to love?”
“You have gone too far. You have married Fester, you have destroyed his spirit, you have taken him from us. All that I could forgive…but Debbie… [glancing at the decor] Pastels?”
