I know we live in a world that is trying to be more and more Gender Neutral. And, I have no qualm in saying that it should be. Many writers and people whose words matter have started to use ‘She’ instead of ‘He’ in their common parlance. In fact, if you have actually understood the meaning of the word Feminism (and not just from a high-level but the actual intention), you would know that there is a need for this -ism because the world is titled in an obvious direction (The World is not straight! Self-pat on the pun. Tilted as in ~23.5°. Bad one!). However, many people get confused and often up-in-arms about why it is called Feminism and not Human-ism or Egalitarianism or whatever your nearest Synonyms Thesaurus can suggest.
I guess some confusion is understandable. Everyone can be confused. Like my Google Mini and FireStick’s Alexa, although they claim to be the smartest and all, are confused themselves as to where they should be. They speak in a feminine voice but when I ask whether they are female, they decline and try to stay neutral. (I know how to change default voice.) Obviously, we have very primitive AI tools at our disposal at the moment. Even if they appear to be amazing, they are closer to being Bluetooth powered Voice-Enabled tools than being actual AI/ML breakthrough.
Set all of this -ism talk aside because now we have to rethink all of that. I think we are at the right juncture in the timeline of technology to start a new gender: The Zeroth Gender, the gender for AI. I hope that when AI truly shows its might, there won’t be any need for gender.
Forget sci-fi movies but if you want to have your mind blown about AI, right now, check this video out.
If you want mind blown further, do you know that this article was written by a Robot? Check it out: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/sep/08/robot-wrote-this-article-gpt-3
Both of them talk about https://openai.com/projects/ and stuff like this. I highly recommend going through them.
You might have seen all episodes of Black Mirror and also the Boston Dynamics videos. Almost all of the technology shown there is already here. You might have also known about how some AI algorithms are ignoring people based on gender and race knowingly or unknowingly. So, right now these AI tools are buggy. But they are being used in all possible ways already. It is just a matter of time that genders, humans, and AI become indistinguishable. Not that there’s anything wrong with that!
P.S.: I was about to title this post as “The Zeroth Gender”. But then the question could have popped up about 1ˢᵗ and 2ⁿᵈ gender and 3ʳᵈ and so on. I am not here to start wars, so well left.
Header Photo by Photo Boards on Unsplash
