The Evening Rocket: Baby X

even forests. We begin to night with new video released from the US Forest Service showing the moment a gender reveal video started the forty seven thousand acres Sawmill fire. Elon Musk and his former girlfriend, the musician Grimes, didn't hold a gender reveal party in a way. They did the opposite. Last year on Twitter, they announced the birth of their baby, who was named X. Grimes that the

baby would be raised without a gender. Like most things involving Elon Musk, this move looks like it has its origins in 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 experiment 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 may be ought to have a place in any vision of the future.

Welcome to The Evening Rocket, a special report. I'm Jill Lapoor. I'm a historian, a professor at Harvard, and for a long time I've been studying the relationship between technological and political change. This series, I'm exploring a new kind of capitalism. Call it Muscism, extravagant extreme capitalism, extraterrestrial capitalism, where stock prices for projects from Tesla and SpaceX to cryptocurrencies and neural implants can be driven by fantasies that come from

science fiction. I'm fascinated by science fiction, even by comic books. They once read a whole about the political history of Wonder Woman. The science fiction men like Elon Musk and Jeff bezos Ador generally concerns gleaming futures in which fantastically

powerful and often immensely rich men colonize other planets. This episode, which is called Baby X, I want to take a look at the science fiction that's usually left out of that vision new way, afrofuturism, feminist science fiction, post colonial science fiction, including the story of Baby X. 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 and children babies. Even I think I can help explain the domestic politics of extreme capitalism. So blast off back to the beginning of this century. No blue smoke, no pink smoke. 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. After the marriage ended, Wilson wrote an essay called I Was a Starter Wife for Marie Claire, a women's magazine, about how weeks after Musk filed for divorce he texted her. She wrote to say he was engaged to a gorgeous British actress in her early twenties. Musk and that actress married, divorced, remarried,

and then divorced again in twenty sixteen. In twenty eighteen, Musk met Claire Bouchet, an innovative Canadian born musician known as Grimes. She had studied neuroscience at McGill. Like Musk, Grimes is an avid science fiction fan. Her first album was a tribute to Doone. The New Yorker once called her a mad pop scientist. She's also a feminist, and she's offered a fierce indictment of the music industry, where she said women feel pressure to act like strippers and

it's okay to make grape threats. Being Musk's girlfriend and doing things like defending him against charges that he prevented Tesla workers from unionizing annoyed a lot of her fans. She's been attacked with a particular venom reserved for female artists and writers. Grimes has got a sophisticated interest in gender and voice. 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. Now, this song might be a little hard for some babies, but some babies might really like it. This is definitely a bit of a hard song though, so I guess you know, to see how your baby feels, and if they don't like techno, then don't play them this song.

Cool sweet. A few months later, 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. This is called gender neutral parenting. It's had some recent uptake among people including celebrities who support the cause of trans rights and who believe children should get the opportunity

to decide their own gender identity. In twenty eleven, when Grimes was at McGill, there was a lot of coverage of a family in Canada. Well, it's a couple in Toronto that is creating a 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 rights, but it's

also very nineteen seventies and second wave feminist. It's an X was absolutely all they would tell anyone, and that made 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 HER's column.

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 this 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. LeGuin, 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 owned 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 key, 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 what either. Legwin 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

Wolf called her Missus Brown. Legwin 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 and black and silver uniforms. Ships capable of blasting other inimical ships into smitherines with their apocalyptic holocaustic rayguns, and of bringing loads of colonists from Earth to unknown worlds. Ships capable

of anything, absolutely anything, except one thing. They cannot contain Missus Brown. And that's my worry too, the worry that, notwithstanding a baby named X, the future envisioned by Muscism, the future being built in Silicon Valley, it doesn't contain Missus Brown either. In two thousand and eight, Vandanna Saying published a short story called The Woman Who Thought She

Was a Planet. It begins this way. Ramnath Mishra'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 Asimov. 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 notice is the complete lack of any kind of environmental awareness, which

of course goes along with techno fetishism. So we have an entire planet Trantor, which is an entire city, and that's just so dumb, because like, how can you have oxygen and climate and so on and so forth if you have a planet that is completely urbanized. I mean, that makes no sense. But the other aspect of it that troubles me is, of course, there are no intelligent women out there in that series. I think there's one example of an intelligent woman who turns out to be

a robot. Seeing 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 me to black holes. So if I'm pondering moving a heavy soup pot from the stove to the counter, I'm thinking gravity, and I'm

suddenly thinking about black holes. Singh's greatest influence was Lagwen. 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 and erased entire societies, cultures, entire gender and other ways of being and thinking and relating to the cosmos. So it was as though Ursula Liguin was telling me that, hey, science fiction is your

country too. Made a lasting contribution to the field itself for many, many people, not just me, because, among other things, she got us away from this boys with toys adolescent obsession purely with technology that science fiction was in its so called golden age starting in the nineteen seventies. Laguin 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, seeing how she understands their attachment. The story is written in the nineteen fifties and even earlier. She said she'd come around to thinking that Silicon Valley

techno billionaires suffer from paradigm blindness. 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 really just don't subscribe to its view of

the world. Saying things 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, and then the rest of us are trapped in the world they're building as if we're subjects of their experiments. That's Grimes singing about artificial intelligence. Grimes and Musk are both storytellers. Their baby X was born

in May twenty twenty three. Days after Grimes gave birth, Musk appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience, where the two men talked about how much they love babies, and then the conversation took an interesting turn. Babies are awesome. They are pretty awesome. They're awesome. Yeah. I think of them like these little love packages. Yeah, little love bugs. I mean. Also, I've spent a lot of time on AI and neural nets, and so you can sort of see the brain developed.

You know what, an annual 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 don't know about 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 hook and 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. Frankenstein is the story of a terrible father, a scientist who, as an experiment, makes a child and

then abandons him. Mary Shelley was the daughter of Mary Wolstroncraft, a founder of modern feminism, and Shelley was a founder of the feminist critique of scientific arrogance Fundamental to what We're doing as a research project called baby X. Today, Baby X is being used as the name of an experiment in artificial intelligence run by a company called Soul Machines, based in San Francisco, but with an R and d arm in New Zealand. They say they're trying to build

digital people, starting with a baby. This is a baby X, So she's basically an autonomously animated virtual infant, all of her behaviors generated on the fly by neural networks running live and so she's seeing me and listening to me and staying to get upset as I'm not paying attention to her, so I need to calm her down. 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, X 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 sexuality is fun, man, If you're going to exist, why not enjoy it? What in between her legs as an opening with a 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 super 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 a 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 mean, with artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon, and I take it there will be no hail nine thousand going

up to Mars. How nine thousand would be easy. It's way more complex than I mean, would put hell nine thousands of shame? I was like poppy Dog, for sure. There's a lot to worry about with artificial intelligence. Beyond a rogue operating system. Like two thousand and one's Hail nine thousand. There's lots that's already happening facial recognition, predictive policing,

AI driven mortgage evaluations, and criminal court sentencing guidelines. And there's plenty to worry about with things that haven't happened yet but look likely as the pace of machine learning increases. Still, I also think there's something deeper and broader going on here culturally in the terror of AI. I think a lot of that fear 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. Ursula k Laguin The K is for Kroeber. She was the daughter of Alfred Kroeber, 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, Ishi

emerged out of the woods. A local sheriff took him to jail, and Alfred Kroeber took him from there to the UC Berkeley Anthropology Museum, where Ishi worked as a janitor and also performed as a kind of museum exhibit. Kroeber recorded his voice on wax cylinders. Growing up under

the shadow of all this powerfully influenced Laguin. If the so called Golden Age of science fiction is told from the advantage of the colonizers, Lagwin and novels like The Dispossessed tried to turn it into the story of the colonized. You might say then that people who worry about ai is an existential risk are trapped in the paradigm of colonialism. Is there an escape? Alohamaycaco Noilanista. I'm doctor noilandi 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, would you get as 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 self 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 gonna 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. It's 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, their wealth or labor extracted. What would it mean to reject the domestic politics of Muscism and

borrow from this world view? What if instead of Frankenstein, futureists adopted a different origin story. I use the story of Halloa, the child of ho Ho Kuiklani and Waukea, the sky Father. 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 callow plant that

we subsist on as a people. Right. The second child born of that union is named Halloa after his brother Hallow in Hawaiian means long breath, and the oha or corm that grows off of the root of the plant that becomes the word for ohana 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 long breath,

the life of the people. That story about reciprocal mutual respect and relationship and care is at the center of a lot of the protocols that we approach Ai with. Do you appreciate what do you appreciate? Power? Do you appreciate 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, even your Ai driven machines, as members of your family, your kin, your child, not X the unknown, but the known, the beloved. Next time, in our final installment, The Evening Rocket blasts to the past for the last time with a look at what muscism is doing to money. Jake. The Evening Rocket was written and read by me Jillapoor For the BBC,

The Evening Rocket was produced by viv Jones. Oliver Riskin Cuts was the researcher. The editor was Hugh Levinson. The commissioning editor was Dan Clark. Iona Hammond was production coordinator. Mixing by Graham put a Foot and original music by Corn Tooth. For Pushkin, it was produced by Sophie Crane, mckibbon and Jake Gorski, who also did the mix and sound design. Production support from Ben Nattapafrick. Our executive producer

is Mielobell. Our operations team includes Danielle Lakhan, Maya Kanig and Carl mcgliori. Thanks also to John Schnar's, Jacob Weisberg, Maggie Taylor, Heather Faine, Nicole Moreno and Eric Sandler.