[ExI] Women

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of David Lubkin
...

>...Here's one thought, which won't help everywhere. Certainly not in a
wealthy misogynistic society, like Saudi Arabia. But it might be a useful
component. Take the one laptop per child project. Change the design so that
the laptops can only be used by women. Perhaps adapting the tech that uses a
laptop's camera to authenticate users.
Can we reliably enough, cross-culturally, identify human sex from a face?
(Perhaps we'd need data specific to each population the laptops go to.) --
David.
_______________________________________________

Now you're thinking, excellent David.  Face recognition may not do it,
especially for children.  Possibly clothing recognition.  I thought of
embedded estrogen receptor chips which would only need to differentiate
between two hormones, but that is probably unnecessary, since there may be
some very straightforward existing technology which could differentiate
between genders.  

But all that may be going off in the wrong direction, since we have seen the
recent appearance of the 100 dollar computer.  These could be distributed
widely, but have no cameras generally and even have a good reason why you
can't really have computer cameras in those benighted cultures.  So the task
of figuring out how to differentiate between male and female would be
entirely in software.  Then the education available in the computer would be
determined by the gender of the user.

We are already part of the way there: install Angry Birds on all the
powerbooks.  Then the male children would be differentially drawn to that
activity, while at least some of the girls are hungry for education and will
spend their time with that instead.

There is an aspect of this whole question that we have not really discussed.
Humanity has been around long enough that most societies in most places
reached equilibrium: population was stable long term, technological growth
was net zero.  An example would be North America before the Europeans and
Africans arrived on the continent.  Europeans were an example of a society
which definitely was not in equilibrium:  we were driven to change by
technological advance.  The basis of capitalism assumes not only a steady
growth, but a wildly large growth.  

David's proposal strikes down one of the basic characteristics of any
equilibrium society by introducing change.  Good chance those societies will
resist, for understandable reasons.  In the long run, non-equilibrium
societies have a huge advantage.  The equilibrium societies know exactly
where they are going: right here.  Zero change is the goal.  In
non-equilibrium societies, we do not know where we are going, but wherever
it is, we want to go there faster.  From the point of view of the
equilibrium society, any scheme we could introduce to raise the status of
their women is an example of accelerating wildly in a random direction.

spike