Showing posts with label Humanity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Humanity. Show all posts

03 August, 2015

You Don't Say

Homophobic attitudes are more likely to found in individuals who harbour unacknowledged attraction towards the same sex, a series of psychology studies have found.
The study, which analysed four separate experiments conducted in the US and Germany, provides empirical evidence to suggest that homophobia is in fact the ‘external manifestation of repressed sexual desires they feel towards their own gender’, reports IBT.
“Individuals who identify as straight but in psychological tests show a strong attraction to the same sex may be threatened by gays and lesbians because homosexuals remind them of similar, unrealised desires they themselves harbour,” Netta Weinstein, a lecturer at the University of Essex and the study’s lead author, explained.
The sexual orientation of participants was measured by how they reacted to words and images with sexual connotations, during a timed task.
“In many cases these are people who are at war with themselves and they are turning this internal conflict outward,” added co-author Richard Ryan, professor of psychology at the University of Rochester who was involved in the study, in which about 650 university students participated.
...
The researchers also said that this may why some homophobic public figures have often caught engaging in homosexual acts.
Huh.  Odd that other political, and especially, partisan dimensions in this context get no mention at all, huh ?

* For the record, I'm not sure if that picture they used is of the particularly brutal dictator I suspect it is meant to be of, and, I'm not expressing any particular opinion of said brutal dictator, if so...

26 June, 2015

Steve Wozniak: Robots Will Make Us Their Pets

Apple’s co-founder: We’re all going to be robots’ pets one day
by Benjamin Snyder     @WriterSnyder     JUNE 25, 2015, 12:23 PM EDT 
Apple AAPL -0.46% co-founder Steve Wozniak thinks we’re all probably going to become robots’ pets.
Speaking at a recent technology conference, Wozniak said that at first the thought of artificially intelligent beings in charge of everything scared him. But now it’s a comforting thought.
Fast forward hundreds of years to when robots are in charge. At that time, humans will probably be treated in a similar fashion to dogs, Wozniak said during an event at the Freescale Technology Forum 2015 in Austin, Texas.
“It’s actually going to turn out really good for humans,” he added. “And it will be hundreds of years down the stream before [artificially intelligent beings would] even have the ability.”
“They’ll be so smart by then that they’ll know they have to keep nature, and humans are part of nature,” he continued. “So I got over my fear that we’d be replaced by computers.”
Wozniak believes robots will helps us because we’re the “gods originally.”
More like animals in a zoo surely ?  If the motivation is preservation of humans as a part of nature.

And even if the robots did treat us like dogs, a lot of us treat dogs...really really horribly.  And if they treated us the way the more 'humane' in society treat dogs, they would still be...restricting our population, neutering us to control our breeding, restricting our movements, controlling out interaction with other humans, strictly controlling our diets, and euthanising us when we got sick or old.  Awesome future you've got mapped out for us there, Woz !

And the 'we're the "gods originally"' stuff is just wishful thinking, as is the rest of it.

What Wozniak really needs to conquer his existential angst, and what this is a form of, is religion.  In this case, it's one involving the fetishisation & worship of technology, and the faith in technology always being there for us, always leading to a brighter future.  A common, but often disappointing faith.

I'd suggest maybe...Buddhism instead ?