Thomas

So much of our training as women tells us that we are objects of desire rather than desiring subjects. We know this. . . . As girls we were often expected to please others, and as women we fear being called selfish. We put others’ needs first, we stifle our own desires, or, worse, we forget we even have them. I’m talking here about sexual desires,... See more

Intelligence is not central to the success of most life on Earth. Consider the grasses: they’ve flourished across incredibly diverse global environments, without planning or debating a single step. Planarian worms regrow any part of their body and are functionally immortal, a trick we can manage only in science fiction. And a microscopic virus... See more

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the

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‘The food is wet and crunchy, and tastes of all the cutting-up she just did to it,’ Brown writes: a sentence that stops the reader in their tracks.