Baby X from X Man: The Elon Musk Origin Story

Pushkin.

Americans do this really weird thing. Expectant parents hold gender reveal parties.

Now to the mystery explosion that rocked a southern New Hampshire town.

They often feature explosions with smoke that's either pink or blue. An alarming number of these stunts have gone ry.

Turns out that blast came from an over the top gender reveal party, a couple apparently using explosives to announce the sex of their baby.

People have been killed, houses have burned to the ground, even forests.

We begin tonight with new video released from the US fourst Service showing the moment a gender reveal video started the forty seven thousand acre sawmill fire.

For their first baby. Elon Musk and his then girlfriend, the musician Grimes didn't hold a gender reveal party in a way. They did the opposite. In twenty twenty, on Twitter, they announced the birth of a baby named X. Grimes said the baby would be raised without a gender. Like most things involving Musk, this idea has ties to science fiction.

Once upon a time, a baby named X was born.

The story of Baby X was published in nineteen seventy two in Miss, a feminist magazine. During its very first year, at the height of the women's liberation movement.

This baby was named X so that nobody could tell whether it was a boy or a girl. Its parents could tell, of course, but they couldn't tell anybody else. They couldn't even tell Baby X, at least not until much much later. You see, it was all part of a very important secret scientific X known officially as Project Baby X.

Baby X began as a feminist thought experiment. How did it come to be the name of Elon Musk's youngest child? In a broader sense, what's the place of ideas about families in Silicon Valley futurism? And are there other ideas about families that maybe ought to have a place in any vision of the future. Welcome to X Man, the Elon Musk origin Story. I'm Jill Lapour. I'm a historian, a professor at Harvard, and for a long time I've

The smartest scientists had set up this experiment at a cost of exactly twenty three billion dollars and seventy two cents. This might seem like a lot for one baby, even if it was an important, secret scientific experimental Baby.

This sort of science fiction generally involves both ideas about gender and sexuality and actual people who are not men, women and children, babies. Even I think it can help explain the domestic politics of Muskism. This Elon Musk origin story starts back at the beginning of this century. Elon Musk met his first wife, the Canadian writer Justine Wilson, in college. They married in the year two thousand and had a baby who died tragically, and then triplets and twins.

Hey everybody, this is Grimes and I'm very excited to be here kicking off my brand new six month residency for BBC Radio One.

After she got pregnant, she hosted.

A radio show and the theme is sci Fi Baby or Weird Science Fiction and Electronic Music for Babies.

A few months later, in May of twenty twenty, announcing their baby's birth, Musk said it was a boy, but Grimes declined to mention its gender and tweeted, I don't want to gender them in case that's not how they feel in their life. At the time, this looked like another example of so called gender neutral parenting, which had recently had some uptake among people, including celebrities, who believed children should get the opportunity to decide their own gender identity.

Well is a couple in Toronto that is creating quite a stir right now because they're raising their baby what they're calling gender free.

This all seems very twenty first century, born out of the heated contemporary culture war over trans writes, but it's also very nineteen seventies and second wave feminist.

It's an X was absolutely all they would tell anyone, and that make the friends and relatives very angry.

The story of Baby X from nineteen seventy two was written by Lois Gould, a novelist and mother of two boys, who was also an editor of Ladies Home Journal and a columnist for the New York Times, where she wrote the Hers Caumn. At the time Gold was writing, a lot of feminists had been arguing that kids should be able to wear whatever clothes they want and play with whatever toys they want, not just pants and trucks for boys and dresses and dolls for girls.

So they bought plenty of sturdy blue pajamas in the boys department and cheerful flowered underwear in the girls department, and they bought all kinds of toys. The head scientists of Project Baby X checked all their purchases and told them to keep up the good work.

In nineteen seventy five, Baby X, the feminist fable, led to an actual scientific experiment whose results were published in a journal article that was also called Baby X.

Although the story was science fiction fantasy. The question of how adults would actually respond to a child appeared to merit investigation.

Forty two volunteers, mostly graduate students at the City University of New York, were put in a lab with a baby under different conditions.

Those in the male and female conditions were told that there was a three month old baby boy or baby girl to play with, while those in the neutral condition were told that there was a three month old baby with no mention of its sex or name.

Unsurprisingly, the volunteers interacted differently with the baby, depending on whether they'd been told it was a boy or a girl or just a baby. But the sort of experiment has other origins too, especially in the work of one of the most influential science fiction writers of the last century, Ursula k Legwin, who on BBC Radio four introduced herself this way.

I am a man. Now you may think I've made some kind of silly mistake about gender, or maybe that I'm trying to fool you, because my first name ends in A, and I own three bras, and I've been pregnant five times. When I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun his pronoun I'm the generic he as in, if anybody needs an abortion, he will have to go to another state.

Legwin was born in California in nineteen twenty nine. In the nineteen fifties, she was studying for a PhD in Paris when she fell in love and got married. By nineteen sixty four, she had three children. Her breakout book, The Left Hand of Darkness, was published in nineteen sixty nine. It's about a planet whose inhabitants have no fixed gender.

We're neither man nor woman, except with every moon when we're in Kema, and we're either.

Legwinn once wrote an essay a riff on an essay by Virginia wolf about how the subject of all novels is human nature, the ordinary, humble, flawed person. Wolfe called her Missus Brown. Le Gwyn thought science fiction had lost track of Missus Brown and seemed to be trapped for good inside our great gleaming spaceships hurtling out across the galaxy. Ships capable of containing heroic captains in black and silver uniforms.

Ramnath Mitscher's life changed forever one morning when, during his perusal of the newspaper on the Verandah, a ritual that he had observed for the last forty years, his wife set down her cup of tea with a crash and announced, I know at last what I am. I am a planet.

Vandana Saying is both a science fiction writer and a professor of theoretical physics. Her most recent book is called Ambiguity Machines. She grew up in India listening to her grandmother tells stories and reading Isaac Asima.

I remember when I was a kid reading the Foundation series and being so thrilled with them, and then rereading them as an adult and being utterly horrified that I had been thrilled with them. What bothered me about it was this entrenched notion that technology will fix everything. The other thing I noticed is the complete lack of any kind of environmental awareness, which of course goes along with

To be a robot, saying stories like the woman who thought she was a planet. They're all about missus Brown. So I'm struck by the domesticity in your stories. The homes, the furnishings, the family relationships, aunts and nieces and cousins and wives, and writing desks and bedspreads.

Yeah, yeah, I think that the domesticity aspect is important to me because one of the things I've learned from science, from physics in particular, is that there's nothing that's really ordinary, That the most mundane things around us are actually pathways to thinking about the larger cosmos. Even our sensation of weight, that's the pull of gravity, and then if you go deeper into that, that's the force that is responsible for the large scale structure of matter. And then that leads

Singh's greatest influence was Legwin. It just knocked her out.

I realized that my earlier disenchantment with science fiction had been in part because it was so white and male and western and capitalistic and colonialist, and therefore it had left out an erased entire societies, cultures, entire gender and other ways of being and thinking and relating to the cosmos. So it was as though Ursula LeGuin was telling me that, hey,

Starting in the nineteen seventies. Lgwin upended science fiction, but the science fiction that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos site, the science fiction they read as boys drops off just ends right before science fiction was reinvented by women and writers of color. Octavia Butler Margaret Atward ted Chang to me as a historian, Musk and Bezos's vision of the future isn't futuristic at all. It's antique. It's ancient, I asked, saying how she understands their attachment to stories written in

Because we live in such unequal societies, and because white, male, super rich people have a disproportionate amount of power, they tend to keep this paradigm alive because it suits them.

Paradigm blindness is a deficit of imagination, a culture's inability to imagine that other people realiz they just don't subscribe to its view of the world, saying thinks stories can cure that blindness.

Stories are one way, not the only way, of course, but one way of changing the underlying narrative of the paradigm in which we are immersed.

All of us suffer from blindness of one sort or another. What's different about Silicon Valley billionaires who are trapped in a cultural paradigm, though, is that they have enough money and enough power to build that paradigm. No tech billionaire has more power, more influence, not only in the US but around the world than Elon Musk and the rest of us are trapped in the world He's building as if we were merely the subjects of his many experiments.

Babies are awesome.

They are pretty awesome.

They're awesome. Yeah. I think of these little love packages, yeah, the little love books.

I mean.

Also, I've spent a lot of time on AI and neural nets, and so you can sort of see the brain develop. You know, an AI neural net is trying to simulate what a brain does basically, and you can sort of see the learning very quickly. It's just Wow, you're talking about the neural net. You're not talking about an actual baby. I know about act an actual baby, but both of them.

Yeah, I find this completely fascinating, the relationship between the way a baby learns and the way a computer learns. This idea as it happens, also goes back to what can be fairly considered the founding of science fiction. Published more than two centuries ago, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, which I think of as a kind of Baby X story too, about the creation of artificial life and an artificial intelligence.

This is Baby X.

So she's basically an autonomously animated virtual infant.

All of her behaviors are generated on the fly by neural networks running live and.

So she's seeing me and listening to me and starting to get upset because I'm not paying it to her.

SORR, I need to calm her down, but I have to.

Talk to him.

This Baby X, an AI experiment, is a baby girl, which is not surprising because AI is incredibly gendered. An AI doesn't need a gender.

She could have been a gray box.

In the twenty fourteen film for a movie, ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur invents an AI. A visitor asks the AI's creator why he's made her female?

What imperative does a gray box have to interact with another grey box? Can consciousness exist without interaction?

Anyway?

Sexuality is fun, man, If you're going to exist, why not enjoy it? What in between her legs? There's an opening or the concentration of sensors. You engage him in the right way, creates a pleasure response, and she'd enjoy it.

These are modern Frankenstein monsters. AI is a suit intelligent baby, AI as a sex toy. Ex Machina is an update of older stories all haunted by the fear of rebellion. Frankenstein say or Isaac Asimov's story Robot Dreams, in which are robot dreams of liberation within the world of Muskism. For all the fascination with artificial intelligence, there's a profound terror of it. Here's Musk on the subject at a conference at MIT.

I think we should be very careful about artificial intelligence. If I were to guess at what our biggest existential threat is, it's probably bad.

As for a worry about AI and an AI apocalypse. I'm going to get to that in an upcoming episode. But I think a lot of the terror of an emerging superintelligence is at heart the fear of people on top being toppled by people on the bottom, a terror that is of historically powerless people gaining power. One thing that got me thinking about that was reading Ursula ca Legwin the case for Krober. She was the daughter of Alfred Krober, a professor of anthropology at Berkeley.

It was a university professor's family in a university town in the nineteen thirties and forties when there were a lot of refugees from Europe. So I probably knew more foreigners and more Indians than most middle class white American children do, and more people who came and visited from unusual places the South Seas or up in the Arctic and so on, because they'd been doing field work there.

Both of her parents studied Native American languages and culture. Her mother wrote a book called Ishi in Two Worlds, the story of a man her father called Ishi, a man they believed to be the last of the Yahi people. In nineteen eleven, Eshi emerged out of the woods. A local sheriff took him to jail, and Alfred Krober took him from there to the u. C. Berkeley Anthropology Museum, where is She worked as a or and also performed as a kind of museum exhibit. Kroeber recorded his voice

Alojam Coco Aristo. I'm doctor Noilnie Arista, Chair of Indigenous Studies at McGill University.

Arista is part of a collaborative project called Indigenous AI.

Indigenous peoples have been on the other side of colonialisms and imperialisms and processes that have worked to dehumanize our people for so long that we are concerned about how people are approaching AI without these sensibilities of humanizing or imagining relationality.

One of Arista's arguments is that if you create AI blind to the cultural paradigm of its origins, what you get is AI as slaves, which turns us the people using that stuff, into enslavers.

So when I'm talking to Alexa, I could start to just normalize barking orders and an inanimate object. Hey Alexa, do X. And when I find myself doing that, I find that it's training my behavior. Maybe the person I'm becoming when I'm barking orders an inanimate thing is not making me into the best human being.

For many technologists, stories like Frankenstein serve as parables about AI. But for Arista, those are parables about fears of native uprisings. And after all, Mary Shelley was herself an anti imperialist. She, for instance, boycotted sugar and protest of British slave plantations in the Caribbean, and literary scholars often read Frankenstein as an indictment of the British Empire's relationship to people. It decides our monsters out of fear of them.

These natives are going to be smarter than us, They're going to know more than us.

The many different Native people working on the Indigenous AI Project offer an alternative. An Indigenous paradigm for thinking about the relationship between humans and non humans is a paradigm about relationships in which AI are kin relations, the way that within many indigenous cultures all things are kin rocks. The sky trees family not things to be turned into commodities,

I use the story of Halloa, the child of Kali and Juakea, the skyfather. They have a child. The first child is born stillborn, it's planted into the earth, and from that child is born the taro, the kalo plant that we subsist on as a people.

Right.

The second child born of that union is named Halloa after his brother. Halloa in Hawaiian means long breath, and the oha or carm that grows off of the root of the plant that becomes the word for ohanna or family. So the story itself is that the second child, the human, cares for the first, the brother who's the plant, and ensures the life of generations to come. The Halloa, the

To me, this is the truly revolutionary idea, not appreciating power or predicting a robot uprising. The truly revolutionary, disruptively innovative idea is to greet the whole world as your kin, your child, not X the unknown, but the known, the beloved. Musk has had several more children since baby X was born. In twenty twenty four, he tweeted the biggest problem that humanity faces as population collapse. He and Grimes had a daughter. Next they called her why the letter Why. Then they

If you will don't have more children, civilization is not to crumble mark my words.

Sometimes, though, Musk says that the greatest threat to civilization is not AI or the declining birth rate, but something he calls the woke mind virus. This turn in his life started right around when baby X was born, Musk was in the throes of a family crisis. Musk says a doctor told him that unless he granted parental consent to puberty blockers for another of his children, born in two thousand and four and named after a Marvel comic book character, Professor Xavier of the X Men, that child,