![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wolven7Google's New Moonshot Project: the Human Body
Google. Let's pretend you're reading these words, right now, and listen to me. Human beings are DIFFERENT. Is there a general baseline within which we all live--a kind of species-wide butter zone? Of course. That's what makes us a fucking species. But the kind of essentialist language and thinking you're using, here, is utter bullshit, and you need to cut it out.
Your language choices--which DO FUCKING MATTER, because connotative weight alters what people think and in what context, because, y'know, LANGUAGE-- are moving rapidly in a direction of talking about "The Right Kind Of Bodies," and the "Right Kind Of Lifestyle." And if that ISN'T your intention, then you need to take a step back and take a hard look at how you're saying what you're saying.
Because this isn't even to BEGIN discussing the problem of normalized expectations of "health" and "Ability." Trying to give everyone access to what they might consider their "best" selves is a brilliant goal, sure, whatever, but by even forwarding the project, you're colouring an expectation of both what that "best" IS and what you think it "Should" look like.
Some people need more protein, some people need less choline, some people need higher levels of phosphates, some people can echolocate, some can live to be 125, every human population has different intestinal bacterial colonies from every other, and when you add all of these things together, you will not necessarily find that each and every human being has the same molecular and atomic distribution in the same PPM/B ranges, nor that when you mix and match, everyone will get to be the best of everything. I'd love it if we could, but everything we've ever learned about our species says that "healthy human" is a constantly shifting target, not a static one.
I mean JESUS CHRIST, and here tech people still wonder why "the straights" react so viscerally to technological advances, and drives toward a technologically-augmented humanity? When we skirt the line of eugenics language? When we talk about naturally occurring bio-physiological Facts as though they were in any way indicative of value, without our input? When we're still fucking up at ethics, at 100mph, then looking back and going, "Shit. Should've factored that in. Oops."
But let's be clear, here: i'm not a doctor. I'm not a physiologist or a molecular biologist. I could be wrong about how all of these things come together in the human body, and maybe there WILL be something more than a baseline, some set of all species-wide factors which, in the right configuration, say "Healthy Human."
What I am is I'm just a guy with a fairly detailed understanding of how language and perception affect people's acceptance of possibilities, their reaction to new (or hauntingly-familiar-but-repackaged) ideas, and their long-term societal expectations and valuations of normalcy. And I'm saying that Google needs to change how they're talking about a LOT of what they're doing, these days.
I should go to bed.
Google. Let's pretend you're reading these words, right now, and listen to me. Human beings are DIFFERENT. Is there a general baseline within which we all live--a kind of species-wide butter zone? Of course. That's what makes us a fucking species. But the kind of essentialist language and thinking you're using, here, is utter bullshit, and you need to cut it out.
Your language choices--which DO FUCKING MATTER, because connotative weight alters what people think and in what context, because, y'know, LANGUAGE-- are moving rapidly in a direction of talking about "The Right Kind Of Bodies," and the "Right Kind Of Lifestyle." And if that ISN'T your intention, then you need to take a step back and take a hard look at how you're saying what you're saying.
Because this isn't even to BEGIN discussing the problem of normalized expectations of "health" and "Ability." Trying to give everyone access to what they might consider their "best" selves is a brilliant goal, sure, whatever, but by even forwarding the project, you're colouring an expectation of both what that "best" IS and what you think it "Should" look like.
Some people need more protein, some people need less choline, some people need higher levels of phosphates, some people can echolocate, some can live to be 125, every human population has different intestinal bacterial colonies from every other, and when you add all of these things together, you will not necessarily find that each and every human being has the same molecular and atomic distribution in the same PPM/B ranges, nor that when you mix and match, everyone will get to be the best of everything. I'd love it if we could, but everything we've ever learned about our species says that "healthy human" is a constantly shifting target, not a static one.
I mean JESUS CHRIST, and here tech people still wonder why "the straights" react so viscerally to technological advances, and drives toward a technologically-augmented humanity? When we skirt the line of eugenics language? When we talk about naturally occurring bio-physiological Facts as though they were in any way indicative of value, without our input? When we're still fucking up at ethics, at 100mph, then looking back and going, "Shit. Should've factored that in. Oops."
But let's be clear, here: i'm not a doctor. I'm not a physiologist or a molecular biologist. I could be wrong about how all of these things come together in the human body, and maybe there WILL be something more than a baseline, some set of all species-wide factors which, in the right configuration, say "Healthy Human."
What I am is I'm just a guy with a fairly detailed understanding of how language and perception affect people's acceptance of possibilities, their reaction to new (or hauntingly-familiar-but-repackaged) ideas, and their long-term societal expectations and valuations of normalcy. And I'm saying that Google needs to change how they're talking about a LOT of what they're doing, these days.
I should go to bed.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2014-07-28 04:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2014-07-29 12:52 am (UTC)In other ways they'll be racist because we'll program them to be racist if we aren't really damn careful. If we look at an "unbiased" computerized look at incarceration rates and don't consider the frequency with which an officer makes the decision not to pursue a minor infraction by someone of his own race, or lets the girl off with a warning because she reminds him of his little sister (which will NOT happen if she's a significantly different race) -
Those are not recorded events. Hell, part of the reason police give warnings is because they don't feel like filing one more report. But it also means unrecorded data. It means that not only does the media see a black person commit a crime and a white person commit a crime and somehow decide only one of those events is news-worthy, but often when the white person commits the crime he's just not arrested.
It's possible that black folks commit more crimes per person than white folks. I'm personally more inclined to think that the natures of the demographics' crimes are different and that black crime is more heavily reported AND more severely punished. But it's possible. I do get where that comment (I think it was Xo) was coming from, with the "you've got to be ready for the possibility that the truth doesn't match your sensibilities" - any less and I might as well be the creationist declaring dinosaur bones a test from God.
But even then, we wouldn't have the cause. It'd take decades for brilliant data-crunchers (human and computer alike/combined) to suss out what portion of a race's crime could reliably attributed to its pure biology rather than its culture. You'd need to ask all the right questions, non-stop, for those multiple decades, and then gain access to all the proper data, and then analyze that data without error. All this would have to happen without any errors in the pipe, for decades.
But I accept that the findings might be something that would make me uncomfortable, if such a study could be undertaken.
Of course, I'd also want to know how significant those biological markers were, relative to cultural factors. If black kids treated with respect and dignity are less likely to commit crimes than white kids, that doesn't mean "purge the white kids." It means "treat more people with respect and dignity."