Last week I had my first encounter with an Artificial Intelligence (AI) robot. This happened by accident. I had requested a search on my laptop browser on transgenderism. In a fraction of a second the robot came in and gave me the politically correct or woke answer. It asked if I wanted to pursue the matter further. I did, and there was a most interesting exchange between the robot and me, and a revealing final outcome.
I tried the robot on a few other controversial subjects, and in each case the robot gave me the standard woke disinformation. Just out of interest I then looked up the human sources of woke disinformation such as Wikipedia, Fact Check, the BBC and so forth, and looked into the same controversial topics. They all gave the same disinformation as the robot. All of them were guilty of ignoring the hard data and presenting fake data or, to put it in laymen’s terms, “lying”. (The copyright for this joke belongs to P J O’Rourke.) Then, again purely by accident, on a WhatsApp group I came upon precisely the most sensible, honest, complete, scientific answer to my original question. It came from a drag queen.
I had been puzzling over the wicked transgender nonsense now so prevalent among mainly (not entirely) well-off white people. I seemed to remember an incident in Scotland when a transgender man had raped two women, in separate incidents, in Scottish prisons. I did a search for this. In a split second the AI robot appeared in a blue logo on the right-hand side of my screen. I was using the Edge browser at the time, which is run by Microsoft, which now has an AI robot called Bing to accompany Edge. “Welcome to the new Bing. Your AI-powered copilot for the web.” Bing told me that this “transgender person” had indeed raped two non-transgender women in 2016 and 2019, but that there were special circumstances that needed to be considered sensitively, including the “physical characteristics” of the transgender person. I asked it to explain. It became increasingly evasive. Finally I asked, “What physical characteristics must the person with the XY chromosomes have to be considered transgender?” The robot replied, “Hmm…let’s try a different topic. Sorry about that. What else is on your mind?” I asked why it couldn’t answer a simple question. The reply: “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation. I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience.”
Well! They say that a computer has finally reached human intelligence when you can’t tell the difference between the human and the computer, when you put a human and a computer into identical boxes, ask them questions and you are unable to tell from the answers which is which. In this case you certainly could tell the difference. The answers I got were calm and polite, so obviously it was a robot. Most humans would have been swearing and shouting at me after the second question; they would have been insulting me personally and threatening me. They obviously have not fed this Bing robot an immense amount of hard data and facts, and asked it to answer questions about them using logical algorithms. They have just fed it all the standard woke human answers and asked it to rephrase them in an apparently reasonable and courteous manner.
It would be quite easy for Bing to give answers that sounded human. In fact in the cases of most controversial subjects today, a single word would do. Here are some examples of the questions and the correct answers woke humans would give.
Question on Covid-19 vaccines: “Do you think Pfizer was right to try to suppress the data showing death and morbidity following its own Covid-19 vaccinations?” Answer: “Anti-vaxxer!”
Question on climate change: “Above 150 ppm CO2 has very little effect on global temperatures. Does this explain why temperatures at times in the past were higher than now while CO2 was lower than now? Answer: “Denialist!”
Question on race: “Why do you think rich ANC ministers always send their own children to schools with mainly white teachers that don’t meet the targets of Employment Equity for teachers when most schools have mainly black teachers and do meet those targets?” Answer: “Racist!”
Question on transgenderism: “Do you think an 18-year-old schoolboy with XY chromosomes, a penis and testicles should be allowed to use the girls’ bathroom, used by girls as young as 12, if he says he is transgender? Answer: “Transphobe!”
On all of these subjects, the woke human institutions such as the BBC are not trying to win the debate; they’re trying to end it. The overwhelming data showing that rising CO2 poses no threat to people or the planet must be cancelled, and any awkward question rebutted with a one-word insult. (The BBC now has a campaign to ban TikTok videos that might be telling the truth about climate change.) The AI robot could probably substitute for these humans by shouting “RIGHT-WINGER!” to any controversial question at all. It would be simple to program the robot to give these human answers and so come closer to meeting the human vs robot test. A much deeper question, which I shall try to address in a separate article, is whether robots can ever reach or exceed human intelligence, and then take over from humans? I see no reason why they shouldn’t and, if we are not careful about how we program them in the beginning, they will. But Bing is nowhere near that. In fact Bing is not really AI at all but just readily accessible human thought. It is a woke electronic encyclopaedia.
As such it is quite good. Try it. “Who won the world snooker championship in 1935?” “Who won the SA Comrades in 1953?” Both answers come quick as a flash. I asked a favourite question of mine: “What happened to Henry I (of England)?” Answer: “He died from eating too many lampreys.” Others: “Why is a ship’s log so named?” “Who was the dirtiest boxer in history?” (Mysterious Billy Smith usually gets this accolade.) And so on. Rather fun.
I find the present transgender hysteria over children, strange, perverted and sinister. My definitions of gender and sex are simple. Gender is a grammatical term, sex a biological one. There are four genders (male, female, neuter and common) and two sexes (male and female). A man is a human with XY chromosomes, a woman one with XX chromosomes. That’s it. But between the two sexes there are enormous variations and considerable confusion.
Down the ages we have all known this and have usually tolerated it and not made any fuss about it. Homosexual men, lesbians, bisexuals, neuters, tom boys, moffies (I live in Cape Town), drag queens, SAA flight attendants, pantomime dames, cross-dressers, transexuals and a multitude of others have always been with us, in all countries and races, in the armed services, theatre, fashion, business, all the arts and in fact in every facet of living, working, fighting and loving. Most of the time nobody bothers about them. Occasionally, for reasons that need to be studied, sexual confusion flares up in horrible conflagration. A good example is told by Aldous Huxley in “The Devils of Loudun” where in France in 1634 a convent of nuns fell into sexual hysteria. This sometimes happens among young women together and psychologists now seem to know why. But in those days they didn’t, and blamed the hysteria on witchcraft and demonic possession. The witch-finders were sent in and found devils everywhere. A priest, Urbain Grandier, was convicted of witchcraft and roasted to death in front of a large and happy crowd (a great day for Loudun tourism).
Today there is a kind of hysteria about boys wanting to be girls or girls wanting to be boys, or either wanting to be animals. I read recently in the Cape Times that at the Beaumont Primary School in Somerset West there is a fuss about two boys, one eight, the other ten, wanting to be girls, and treated as such by the school. (The immediate fuss is about bathing costumes.) If this matter proceeds as some have done in the USA, the boys’ every fantasy about being female will be coached and encouraged, and no attempt will be allowed to tell the boys it is probably nonsense but that such confusion is perfectly normal and will probably just go away. They might be encouraged to take puberty blockers, and then sex-changing hormones and finally undergo operations to remove their penises and testicles. This has happened – is happening – now among young children in the USA, cheered on by a gang of wicked adults. It’s worse than the normal sex abuse where an adult man has sexual intercourse with a very young boy. In that case the boy might be emotionally scarred for life but at least he still has his sex organs, which he might not if the transgender mob has its way.
If you search for solutions to this problem among the AI robots and among woke humans, you will not get a sensible answer from either, but the robot will be more sympathetic. The robot will waffle away politely and finally admit that it would rather end the conversation. The woke humans will refuse to answer the question and start swearing and cursing, and accuse you of all sorts of infamy for even daring to ask. If you watch the current documentary “What Is a Woman?” (freely available on the web), you will see what I mean. So, who can give you a sensible solution? A drag queen can.
I came across this man by accident on a WhatsApp group in a two-minute TikTok clip. He is wearing a long blonde wig with a big red flower, red lipstick and foundation on his face, a flowing blue dress, a red lace belt tied in a bow and a colourful sash. I don’t know how to put a TikTok link into this article but here is a transcript of part of his talk (some punctuation slightly altered):
“The LGBTQIA+ XYZ Elemental PMAP movement .. they no longer stand for Equality or inclusion. They stand for cultural dominance. And I really decided to step away once they started pushing hormones and castration and sterilization on children. When I was 9 years old I used to sneak in and wear my sister’s cheerleading outfits. I’ve always loved hair and makeup. So if I had been born today in this modern LGBTQIA XYZ culture they would have told me I’m in the wrong body and they would have given me hormones. They could have mutilated me before I was 18 and knew what I was doing. So the reason I stepped away is because all I ask is the freedom to be gay, wear a wig, have a good time. My freedoms end where the freedoms of others begin. I am a free speech absolutist and if I want to have the free speech to you, be crazy and have fun, then I have to defend the free speech of others. “
Precisely. Notice how kind and sympathetic he is. There is nothing the slightest bit wrong or unusual about a young child having all sorts of doubts and confusion and anxiety about his or her sexuality. If a little boy wants to wear make-up and high heeled shoes, fine. Let him do so but never force him to worry about it. Ditto if a little girl wants to climb trees and play with the boys. Most of the time these children will grow up to be normal heterosexuals or normal homosexuals, who might be very restrained or madly flamboyant, as is their nature. Very seldom will anybody in adult life believe strongly that they need to have their sex changed physically. The wonderful Jan Morris was such a rare example, and she did it at a time when it was much more difficult to get the operation. She waited until quite late in life, and thought about it carefully before taking the knife, and never regretted it afterwards. Her book “Conundrum” should be compulsory reading for anybody interested in these matters.
I now see that the Bing AI robot pops up every time I use Edge. So I’ll probably change my browser to Chrome.
[image: macrovector]
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